• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Advertise
  • About Craft Brewing Business

Craft Brewing Business

Professional Insight, Unfiltered

Craft Brewing Business Craft Brewing Business
  • News
  • Business & Marketing
  • Packaging & Distribution
  • Equipment & Systems
  • Ingredients & Supplies
  • Webinars & White Papers
  • News
  • Business & Marketing
  • Ingredients & Supplies
  • Packaging & Distribution
  • Equipment
  • Webinars & White Papers
  • COVID-19

Great Moments in Craft Beer: Brewer infuses yeast with Wu Tang Clan beats (for real)

December 14, 2016Chris Crowell

This year has seen its fair share of wild yeast strains. Here’s a quick list if you misssed them:

  • Cultures ensconced in amber 45 million years ago
  • Chair yeast from the guy who wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
  • Pre-industrial revolution brewing yeast found in a shipwreck
  • Australian belly-button yeast

We aren’t even going to re-link to the one about the model’s vagina, but yeah, that happened too. Anyway, while these can be promotional stunts, there is something cool (dare I say spiritual?) about using the art form that is brewing a beer and crafting something totally unique, with the final outcome directly influenced by a certain person/time/place.

But here’s a question: Is there any other way to do this that doesn’t involve ingredients?

wu tang clan beer yeast
This beer ain’t nuthing ta F’ wit.

Derek Garman, head brewer at Fortnight Brewing in Cary, N.C., believes there is. We found this on Vice‘s Food vertical Munchies, and encourage you to read the full feature there, but the gist is Garman tried using the sonic vibrations from one of his favorite albums — Wu-Tang Clan’s Enter the Wu-Tang — to influence the taste of his latest Wu Tang-inspired beer Bring Da Ruckus. The thinking here is the constant sound would stress out the yeast and alter the flavor.

From Munchies:

He and other brewers encircled the brewery’s fermentation tank with two 30-inch speakers and blasted Wu-Tang at maximum volume for nearly two weeks while their beer was churning away. The novel experiment forced Garman to wear earplugs for days on end, left him with several headaches, and transformed some of his employees into figurative zombies.

CBB is always talking about the link between beer and music, so we love the experiment. So… did it work?

To prove the difference between the two ales wasn’t just hocus pocus, Fortnight sought out a laboratory and a German beer scientist.

“The lab showed that there was a distinct chemical difference between the two, even though it’s got the same ingredients,” he said. “The only difference was the sound.”

But there is more to the story — that includes a recent history of using sounds during alcohol production, as well as the side of the skeptics who don’t believe in those test results. Definitely read the full thing on Vice.

Also, I’m officially starting a campaign for someone out there to set up their speakers and brew CBB up a big batch of Mosaic Master of Puppets IPA.

White Labs launches PurePitch Next Generation as ‘the easiest way to pitch the most verifiably superior yeast on the planet’
R-Yeast-yeast-shot-2-med-res
This novel lager yeast could revolutionize commercial lager production
microbiome
Research shows gut health virtues of spontaneously fermented beers and ciders
VERDANT-IPA-Side-LowRes-modif
Lallemand, Verdant Brewing team up on this new IPA yeast

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Primary Sidebar

Latest News

  • Athletic Brewing earns Certified B Corp status as it celebrates four years
  • 2022 Beer Branding Trends Part 2: Beyond Beer
  • Anderson Valley Brewing promotes price stability amid Big Beer price hikes: ‘We actually like our customers’
  • Ohio how has 400 craft breweries! Here are some other Buckeye beer stats to know

Sign up for our newsletter

unsubscribe from list

Most Popular Today

Recent Features

  • 2022 Beer Branding Trends Part 2: Beyond Beer
    May 23, 2022
  • The-IBA-TeamIBA hits milestone – 1 million bbls of buying power – what’s next for the co-op?
    May 19, 2022
  • 2022 beer branding trends part 1: reinvention
    May 17, 2022
  • satisfaction surveysAre brewery employees happy? Depends on the department
    May 16, 2022
  • Male hand closes hatch of brewery tankUnfiltered: Do I need to clean tanks between transfers?
    May 11, 2022
  • Hard seltzers: Achieve high alcohol fermentations in a clean and neutral way with the proper nutrient aids
    May 9, 2022

Footer

  • Email Newsletter Sign Up
  • About Craft Brewing Business
  • Contact Us
  • Advertise on Craft Brewing Business
  • Media Kit Download
  • Privacy and Terms

© 2022 · CBB Media LLC

Posting....