It’s Been a busy week at work (I work in IT), after the first bag of paw paws started to go bad i froze the pulp, and on Wednesday I got more from the Rocky Point Farm.

Apparently the raccoons ravaged their supply, and so I got one bag of fruit and one bag of pulp. ( I was prepared to buy more but relented)

After my wife tried a paw paw for the first time last night , she loved it and then I told her I bought 3 paw paw trees for our yard , and that’s that, she’s sold on it. I also have about 30 seeds now at this point I want to germinate next spring .

As it stands now I have about 6 lbs of paw paw pulp, and I think I’m done . At $10 a pound, 60 bucks for an adjunct is simply too expensive to go beyond that amount. For the remaining 4 lbs of fruit , I’m thinking plum and nectarines , or some other local fruit.

The real point of getting the intact fruit originally, was to harvest the saccharomyces that may live on the skin. Today I opened my Bootleg biology yeast wrangling kit and went for it.

Not willing watch this fruit rot , I went forward with preparing my yeast harvesting kit. I will say, there’s not much instructions for creating a very small batch of wort, so I made a gallon of wort , which was actually 3.5 gallons and consisted of dry 14 oz of dry extract , 15 minute boil, and a .1 oz hop boil additionally for another 15 minutes .

In the end the gravity was 1.05 which was way higher than the recommended gravity for wild yeast capture so I watered it down to 1.03.

The kit contains 6 test tubes , and after looking at my bag of paws paws , I decided to extract the skin of the fruit into this order:

2 test tubes for an unripe paw paw.

2 test tubes for a newly ripe paw paw

2 test tubes for an overly ripe but not rotten paw paw

I excised dime/nickel sized slivers of rind from each fruit and labeled them accordingly.

Then when the wort cooled to 70 degrees in an ice bath , I piped in wort into the tubes until the 13 ml was met .

Now it is in my closet to forget for another time .

I also planted the main jar of wort under the tomato plants in my garden , I’m curious whether tomatoes have any interesting yeast.

The tubes will be left alone for weeks , tomorrow I’ll need retrieve this jar from my garden and seal it for wild fermentation. If anyone is interested you can find the kit here:

https://bootlegbiology.com/backyard-yeast-wrangling-tool-kit/

Crossing my fingers this will work 💪🏼

Here’s a walkthrough as well for the yeast capturing process..

https://bootlegbiology.com/diy/capturing-yeast/