Amouranth, the Kick streamer, is allegedly brewing beer with her vaginal yeast. It’s an obvious publicity stunt to squeeze more money from her impressionable and “thirsty” audience.
Gross-factor aside, is this even possible? Is it analogous to brewer’s yeast? Would this cause undesirable side effects or introduce undesirable compounds?
I understand that fungi can and do swap genes, so I wonder if they’ll try to create a brewer’s and vaginal yeast hybrid.
They can, to an extent, if you had lots time and a staffed lab. Crossbreeding yeast strains is kind of tough as most of the ones used in industrial fermentation (ie the stable, commonly used ones) don’t breed well with others and when they do crossbreed, the resulting new strain is often infertile itself. It’s possible, but difficult, unreliable and the resources required put it well beyond the scope of people who don’t own a brewing company.
That’s fascinating!
Amouranth just apparently dropped $17mil on some fruit farms, so money isn’t a problem for her, but who knows if she would go to the trouble, since it sounds pretty error-prone.
I told myself I wouldn’t do it but I did the research: turns out there’s one company who claims to brew with “donor” yeast and that’s the company she’s talking about partnering with. As far as I can tell from everything I’ve found reporting on them these claims are unverified so everything below should be taken with a large amount of skepticism.
Their websites are pretty sparse with information (and unsurprisingly creepily neckbeardy) but looking at what’s available and been reported I’ve been able to piece together what I think is happening. They talk around it and try to couch it in scientific jargon, it sounds like they’re using it to produce lactic acid only, so no alcohol, which is then sterilised and filtered to death before being used as an additive.
All in all it seems that the steps they describe between “donor” and beer that would result in no actual yeasts from the “donor” in the beer at any point, or even any yeasts cultivated from the originals - Which would seem to be the ultimate intent, probably for food safety law complaince. And this all assumes that they aren’t just lieing about it.
