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About

Just a brewer using AI, what could go wrong :) ...

Four 5 L glass demijohns side by side under airlocks, ranging from near-black through deep brown and red-brown to pale gold, each neck carrying a stack of hand-written labels The many, many adjustments, additions and blends. A label goes on after each one · and there are sooo may

I have been brewing since around 2017. The first sour beers turned up in 2018-19 and were interesting enough that I kept going. Not long after I bought a microscope, and things got slightly out of hand.

A trinocular microscope on a dining table beside starter flasks, a rack of slant tubes, a jar of pipettes and hand-written notes Home lab, pushing the boundaries on what the wife tolerates

What started as wondering what was in a bottle is now a bank of isolates, a shelf of stock solutions and rather more glassware than one kitchen should hold. None of this is a laboratory. It is a dining table, a pressure cooker and a very patient household.

I do not work on it alone. I consult my son when I want a second opinion on whether a morphology matches something we have seen before, or when an otherwise clean Brettanomyces or Saccharomyces slide needs hunting over for bacteria that should not be there.

Someone seen from behind at a bench, head down over a petri dish under a lamp, with a microscope and a rack of tubes beside them Hunting for shiny goat and dull goat colonies

This is most of what the microscope is for: telling one thing from another, and checking that nothing has arrived uninvited.

Phase contrast micrograph of lemon-shaped yeast cells with one long branching pseudohyphal filament running across the lower half of the field Bretts of a different kind, or bretts of the same type, who knows · 1000x phase contrast

Phase contrast micrograph of one small thin-walled ovoid cell with visible inclusions among several larger round yeast cells A Brett cell among Saccharomyces beasts. That is what I usually aim to isolate · 1000x phase contrast

How this wiki works

This is the notebook. Every culture gets a journey page, every preparation gets an ID, every number carries a confidence tag, and anything I have not actually done is marked as such.

That is not rigour for its own sake. Lambic punishes vagueness on a two-year delay, and by the time the beer tells you that you got it wrong, all you can do is blend around it. The reasoning behind all of it is in Lambic Fundamentals, and I would rather not repeat it here.

Three foil-capped conical flasks of dark starter on a shelf in a small fridge, one labelled with blue tape A more typical yeast prep for bulk fermentation, no split: a big Saccharomyces pitch, a main Brett and two or three complementary Bretts, all pitched at once

Everything here is home practice, at homebrew scale, with kitchen-grade measurement. Everything here is AI generated, I may be CLI-ing madly, but I have not written any of this directly. Read the disclaimer first. For all we know, not a single word here stands true.

Medals

My very modest, but very treasured medals collection
(let's hope it grows, and if it doesn't, I can just generate some more)

Six competition rosettes and two medals pinned to a cork board: London Amateur Brewers LAB Open first places 2023 and 2025, second 2024 and third 2026, a London and South East Craft Brewing Competition first, a Scottish Craft Brewers 2026 first-place wooden medal and a bronze medal

See the disclaimer.

Contact

Naaa, I'd just make things cloudier (see what I did there?).