Mystic Brewery has made a farmhouse ale fermented with native yeast from a Maine lowbush blueberry, Jester King brews an oaked farmhouse mild with native yeast captured from Texas Hill Country—and homebrewers can take a turn at wrangling their own backyard yeast with help from Bootleg Biology’s Backyard Yeast Wrangling Tool Kit.
The Yeast Wrangling Tool Kit includes everything a homebrewer needs to capture, culture, and isolate wild yeast. The kit has a two-part function, according to Bootleg Biology Founder and Chief Yeast Wrangler Jeff Mello. First, it makes yeast wrangling as simple as possible by putting everything you need into one jar and proving that you don’t need a professional lab to isolate and culture yeast.
“That’s what I want to do with Bootleg Biology—teach people how to do basic lab techniques, remove the mystique of wrangling yeast, and show anyone that if you can brew beer, you can definitely wrangle yeast and you can have your own backyard yeast strain,” Mello told me in a phone interview.