*waves*

[mnewell]

Hi. Long time no write. Most of my short meanderings are going on Facebook, and my longer ramblings are letters to a college friend. Blogging has been a low priority... hell, a lot of things are, with my current lack of time and energy

Comments

[dandrake]

Wow. In this year alone, I've started homebrewing with some friends, and we now make our own yogurt. We also live in the land of kimchi, and I've decided that having microorganisms make my food and drink is totally awesome.

What kinds of fermentation? I know it's not brewing, but I'm curious, since I now know something about watching yeast grow.

[mnewell]

All kinds, and it's not just yeast. Right now we've got 10L batches of yeast and a mold- the yeast is a small production run of an unusual strain, it's going to be used as a seed culture for a larger run (~3k L) next week. The mold is an internal project; we're trying to optimize biomass for extraction of a protein used in genetic research (they'd like to sell it along with the restriction enzymes they make currently).

One of our biggest runs is Pseudomonas syringae, a plant pathogen that's used to make artificial snow at ski resorts :) We grow 3 runs of that a week for three months during the winter.