Samples Prepared for Analyses
Hey all, we found ourselves playing the waiting game over the last few months. Let me explain. After this experiment went public and started getting funding on Experiment.com, we began digging deeper into our sample selection to ensure that the best possible experiment could be conducted. After some long talks with the R&D specialist at Briess Malting Co, Bob Hansen, we came up with a sample set that, while inherently variable, we might be able to get some meaningful results.
Stepping back a bit, when we use grain as the inoculant for sour wort, we are using a ~wild~ culture. The variables that are in place before we ever grind the malted barley and throw it into wort are complex, numerous, and frankly, not well understood or studied. That said, you have to start somewhere and with perhaps a thoughtful sample set, we might be able to observe something useful at the end of it all.
Long-story-short, we wanted to compare malts from different regions, from different harvest years, and from different varietals. The "wait" we went through was due to waiting for the 2016 harvest to be malted and delivered to us so we could compare some things to the 2015 harvest. There's actually a lot more I want to say about all of this, but I'll just post our sample preparation notes and let you see where we're at.
[Note: this document is just the lab notes from the sample preparation. These samples will now be sent out for sequencing and NMR analysis. Those results, once returned, will be the completion of this experiment.]
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