Besides individual projects, there's also the group projects such as beer making!! It's the highlight of the week..anything to do with alcohol is always a highlight. But for Ping, it was more the fun of making it since Ping never did build up the affinity for beer although some of them do has a lovely whiff to it. We just bought a commercial kit for the process from
Beer and Wine Hobby. While making it, we were all worried about the sterility of the instruments and pots that we used. I thought that was kinda funny because when we're cooking or making yogurt or bread, we never did think about sterility. But here we are, working in a microbiology lab, growing our cultures with one hand and a beer bottle in another hand...yet we're worried about sterility.
The first picture is the ingredients that we used. The beer we made was Honey Amber Ale. Looking at the recipe, it surprises me how much sugar is used to make beer and yet the drink is sooooooooo bitter. I guess the yeast used must be highly efficient enough to convert a huge chunk of the sugar to alcohol. The pot we were stirring is just the mixture of the wheat, malt and tons of sugar. It actually taste pretty good..kinda like 'bah leh ko' that we used to buy from 'cha tiam mah' when we were kids. Once the mixture boils and we added all the materials, we had to cool the beer, which we did in a huge bucket filled with ice. The third picture is R and B siphoning the mixture into the bottle. We then added the yeast, shake it up real good and let it sit for about a week.
We also hooked up some balloons to the brewing bottle to collect the CO2 gas emitted from the fermentative reaction of the yeast. Ours is the 2nd one from the left - Love Potion No. 9. About 35-40 hours later, our balloon started to fill up really well. We had the yeast that started out a lot slower as by the time our balloon started to fill up, the others we already about to burst.
Just this past weekend, we transferred the beer to a new bottle, leaving the yeast behind. Commercially, this would be the 'bottling step'. We also streaked them out on nutrient agar and there's definitely no growth besides yeast. Wheeee hah! There'll be our 'homemade beer' for the next symposium. I might actually try some....
The first picture is the ingredients that we used. The beer we made was Honey Amber Ale. Looking at the recipe, it surprises me how much sugar is used to make beer and yet the drink is sooooooooo bitter. I guess the yeast used must be highly efficient enough to convert a huge chunk of the sugar to alcohol. The pot we were stirring is just the mixture of the wheat, malt and tons of sugar. It actually taste pretty good..kinda like 'bah leh ko' that we used to buy from 'cha tiam mah' when we were kids. Once the mixture boils and we added all the materials, we had to cool the beer, which we did in a huge bucket filled with ice. The third picture is R and B siphoning the mixture into the bottle. We then added the yeast, shake it up real good and let it sit for about a week.
We also hooked up some balloons to the brewing bottle to collect the CO2 gas emitted from the fermentative reaction of the yeast. Ours is the 2nd one from the left - Love Potion No. 9. About 35-40 hours later, our balloon started to fill up really well. We had the yeast that started out a lot slower as by the time our balloon started to fill up, the others we already about to burst.
Just this past weekend, we transferred the beer to a new bottle, leaving the yeast behind. Commercially, this would be the 'bottling step'. We also streaked them out on nutrient agar and there's definitely no growth besides yeast. Wheeee hah! There'll be our 'homemade beer' for the next symposium. I might actually try some....
1 comment:
omg fun! ! ! ! !
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