Skip to content

About

Just a brewer using AI, what could go wrong... 😅

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.

I like the process of making beer as much as I like the beer itself.

A 20 L glass carboy of hazy golden beer under an airlock on a kitchen floor Overfilled big boy

A cardboard box of green 375 ml bottles, some corked and caged, some capped Corked and capped, ready for cellaring

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 also like studying, chemistry especially, and building things. The brewing numbers come from a spreadsheet calculator I put together myself, tailored to my equipment. It does pretty much everything other calculators do, pH estimations included.

A spiral notepad of handwritten study notes on water hardness, alkalinity and ppm as CaCO3 Water chemistry

Screen capture of a dense brewing spreadsheet with input tables and a chart The home-made calculator

And I like fermenting things in general. They are delicious, and healthy.

A round sourdough loaf with a floured, scored crust cooling on a wire rack Sourdough

A conical flask of fermenting padrón chillies under an airlock Fermented padrón chillies

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.

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 my lovely wife tolerates

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 the right 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, not to scale

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, not to scale

How this wiki works

This is the notebook. Technical data is revised and updated as I learn, and AI skills are added as I build them. 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.

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

Several conical flasks of starter of different sizes in a fridge, some under cling film, one under an airlock, beside a glass of capped tubes A split-batch pitch: several types of organism, each prepared in a different amount

Everything here is home practice, at homebrew scale, with kitchen-grade measurement. I do the bench work, take the photos, record the numbers and make the calls. AI does the typing: research write-ups and site upkeep, from my notes, checked by me. I may be CLI-ing madly, but I have barely written any of this directly. Read the disclaimer first. Every word here is checked; not every word is right.

Contact

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

... but if you must: contact [at] wild-brewing [dot] com. I have no means to reply, but if there is something I am doing wrong and you are kind enough and inclined to tell me, I would love to hear about it.

A glass demijohn of deep red fruit beer under an airlock, sediment on the surface