It’s not surprising that when you scratch the surface of something complicated, you’re likely to enter a much larger room of knowledge, most of which you don’t know.

Buying a microscope was the most reasonable thing I could have done, because smelling and tasting are empirical senses that should be done AFTER something is safe . I needed more information. Leaving the fruit excisions in the sample was a clear mistake , because it provided a substrate for bacteria and generated off flavors toward the end of the second week. The other samples never smelled good , so I measured the FG and threw them out.

However as mentioned previously , the over ripe samples smelled really good for a week and a half , and then they began to smell sour. The general rule of thumb, is that if it smells good , and it’s completed fermentation, taste it.

That’s where I knew my new microscope would save me from starting over , because I know I have something . After seeing it magnified, it’s an unneeded risk knowing there’s that much bacteria.

Today I was going to streak agar plates in the effort to isolate this yeast , but I decided to experiment with re-propagating the yeast into new wort samples. This wouldn’t make any difference, except for that I’m modifying the ph for each sample , from the control which is around 4.8, stepping all the way down to 2.7. Hopefully I can obtain a less infected sample this way to streak .

I might be totally wrong, but I accomplished this by adding varying drops of lactic acid to each tube .

I pulled wort from the middle of my target sample with a pipette, and put 3 drops into the new sample tubes to inoculate the wort.

The jar that I air inoculated had very little yeast and a lot of microbes that looked dubious, and so I dumped it .

So I ended today with a rack of samples to ferment . I’m only going to wait a week before streaking this time .

On a lighter note , reproductive yeast are said to be nicknamed “schmoos”, after the character from Lil’Abner due to the similarity in shape . I looked up “schmoo plush” online but came up empty handed lol. This reminds me a little of Jake the dog from Adventure Time , because of his shapedshifting heroism. 🥹 so adorable !

I’m going to give these Schmoos a chance 💪🏼