Ever ask a local brewery for yeast?

The talk of brewers being weary of giving info about the yeast reminds me of a funny encounter I had when I first started brewing commercially. I brewed a strawberry saison using French Saison yeast and a brewer sent an e-mail cussing us out accusing us of harvesting yeast from one of their beers... Said we "stole" it and that it was a special house strain that they had been working on. In reality, their beers suffered from contaminants on a regular basis and if I was going to harvest yeast from a brewery, I certainly would have done so from a brewery that had better quality control... They didn't like my response.

 

I and a number of other club members came home with a growler full of yeast slurry, courtesy of the host of last year's Big Brew. I've also been offered yeast by the brewers at a couple of local brew pubs.

 

I know who of which you speak and I'm not surprised.

 

This was a small brewery: probably 8 employees tops. I'm not sure what else he did, but it's not like he was a full time tour guide.

Anyway, I'm aware this one incident doesn't prove anything one way or the other. As we can see from the other posts in this thread, lots of breweries think nothing of giving yeast, but there are some who are pretty weird about it.

 

That's pretty funny and mighty arrogant of them to claim you 'stole' their yeast if they put beer "out there" with enough still in suspension to culture some up. As far as them "working on the yeast", what the hell does that mean?
I have a yeast that was first given to me in the early 1980s and which I continually repitched through more than 2 dozen
generations before I finally saved it to slants. After 30 years I'm still using this yeast for the vast majority of my beers. Even after all that time and the "training" that the yeasties got in my admittedly rather 'ghetto' system, I sincerely doubt that it would have mutated enough to become a 'new' strain. Whatever it was when it was given to me (and I really don't know, although I do have a suspicion or two about it), it is very likely still the same strain it started out as and still gives me the exact, perfect (to me anyway) results that it has always given.

I tend to chuckle at breweries that tout a "proprietary" strain, unless perhaps they cultured something out of the 'flora' in their local environment. There may be some brewers who mix a variety of strains, but even doing that doesn't result in anything new when saved since one strain will always dominate, particularly over a few generations.

 

Point taken. I was thinking of a couple different brewery tours I had been on - One was led by 70 year old matron on loan from the county historical society and the other by a fresh-face giggling teen who hadn't had a legal drink yet but was coached to ask ""Who knows the four ingredients in beer?"