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Microbe

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(Redirected from Yeast Testing)

Microbes vary by location and are used in the brewing of beer. There are 100 microbes, named for the microbe type and a unique number from 1 to 100. The microbe types are Yeast, Acetobacter, and Lactobacillus, and Mold, so a microbe might be called "Yeast-1" or "Acetobacter-20". Types for each of the 100 microbes are randomized each tale, along with yeast properties.

List of known microbes ✓

Documenting microbe locations and recipes on the wiki is still encouraged!
Please consider also utilizing the beer recipe database for seal times and recipes: https://atitd.sharpnetwork.net/beer/

How to Determine Microbe Characteristics

In Tale 6, Egypt was still working to ascertain the capabilities of each microbe (or at least each yeast—we try to exclude other microbes from the kettle, so knowing their stats isn't too critical). Some yeasts are understood; others are still being researched. If you want to help research an unknown yeast, here's how to do it.

All of the really important characteristics of a yeast can be sussed out using 3 tests. (We're assuming here, of course, that you've already worked out a location and seal time for the yeast you want to study.) Don't expect these tests to give you beer you can drink—they'll probably all end up Cloying, unless you get lucky—they're just for data-gathering purposes. Use the clipboard option to get a copy of the results so you can refer to them later.

Malt Flavors Test

1. First Test: 100 medium malt @ 120, 100 honey @ 60. Not knowing anything about a new yeast, you first want to try a brew with a lot of sugar and vitamins, so that you can discover the absolute maximum alcohol this yeast can produce. 100 medium malt and 100 honey will give you plenty. From the results of this test, you can determine the yeast's:

  • Maximum alcohol level. Very important.
  • Growth rate. Once you know a yeast's alcohol max, you can nearly always work out whether the growth rate is 10%, 20%, 30%, or 40%.
  • Vitamin ratio. You can easily calculate the starting vitamins in the brew (2733, if you used the suggested recipe above), and then you need only subtract the vitamin level in your finished brew to figure out how many vitamins the yeast ate. Knowing how much alcohol was created, you can work out the vitamin ratio pretty easily by taking the ending alcohol and dividing by the number of vitamins consumed.
  • Malt flavors. Looking at the flavor levels produced, you now know how much of each of the following flavors this yeast produces at max alcohol: Orange, Banana, Cherry, Date, Honey, Nutmeg, Cinnamon, Grassy, Nasty. Assuming you used no light or raw malt, you can conclude that all of the Grassy flavor in the brew came from yeast. For Honey flavor, you need only subtract the amount of flavor that was added by ingredients—in the suggested recipe above, 100 honey @ 60 produces an even 1000 flavor. Thus, if your brew contains Honey flavor of 1079, you know that 79 of that flavor is the result of your yeast.
Suggested alternate testing strategy:
Use 50 medium malt and 50 medium wheat at 120, (plus 100 honey at 60) that way you can determine both the malt and wheat 
flavors by doubling them plus or minus one in your first test. Barley, Honey, and Bread flavors from
the additives aren't affected by the ratios the way the yeast flavors are, so you should be able to
calculate all of the flavors from this test. 
--Kuu
Flavors added by ingredients using Kuu's recipe:  75 barley, 75 bread, 1000 honey.  2900 vitamins


Sugar Floors Test

2. Second Test: 30 light malt @ 12. The sole purpose of this test is to discover the glucose and maltose floors. This recipe is extremely low-sugar, but provides enough to ensure that the sugar floors will be reached. Check your alcohol level afterwards: it should be above zero, but below the maximum for this yeast. If so, you can be confident that the yeast stopped working due to hitting the sugar floors (and not from any other factors); thus, your ending glucose and maltose are the glucose and maltose floors, respectively. (NOTE: If you have an extremely low-alcohol yeast—one where max alcohol is less than 300—then 30 malt will probably be too much sugar; in those rare cases, try 20 malt instead.

Wheat Flavors Test

3. Third Test: Wheat. Finally, run a test using only honey and wheat, so that you can determine the wheat flavors—Bread, Grapefruit, Pear, Blackberry, Prune, Jasmine, Clove, Vanilla, Herbal—this yeast produces at max alcohol. Design your recipe to ensure that the brew successfully hits the alcohol cap. Doing the first test again, only with wheat (100 medium wheat @ 120, 100 honey @ 60), will do it, but at this point you know enough about this yeast's characteristics that you can probably design a more economical recipe that uses fewer ingredients. Waste not, want not! It's best to avoid using light or raw wheat in your recipe; that way you can be sure that all of the Herbal flavor in the brew is the result of yeast action. Also, for your Bread flavor results, remember to subtract the amount of flavor that was produced by your wheat (this should be an easy calculation if you know what you added and when. 100 Medium Wheat added at 120 produces 150 Bread flavor).

Congratulations! You now know everything about this yeast—except for vitamin threshold and alcohol threshold. These features are a lot more difficult to work out, requiring multiple tests.

Thresholds

1. Vitamin threshold. This requires a series of largely trial-and-error tests. Vitamin threshold is the vitamin level below which the yeast will stop working. It can be anywhere from 0 to around 240. To suss out this figure, try a series of low-vitamin recipes—honey-only recipes work best and are cheap—to find the lowest vitamin level at which the yeast creates alcohol. If you get 10 alcohol from a 54-vitamin recipe, but a brew with 53 vitamins produces nothing, then you have proven this yeast's vitamin threshold is 54.

2. Alcohol threshold. This one's very complex, and I don't have an easy method yet for figuring it out. Alcohol threshold is the alcohol level above which the yeast will stop working. It's easy to guess a possible range by looking at a yeast's max alcohol—if a yeast can produce 847 alcohol, then you know that alcohol threshold must be 846 or less (otherwise it would keep producing), and you also know the threshold must be high enough to allow alcohol to reach 847 in the first place. But to get an exact figure, you need a two-yeast brew—you need to have both Yeast A and Yeast B making alcohol together, so that the alcohol produced by Yeast B is enough to push Yeast A over its alcohol threshold. It's complicated and takes a lot of careful testing and spreadsheet work.

Locations

Tests made by players over the tellings suggest that the microbe population shifts as your kettle crosses coordinate lines. The degree of shift is dependent on the degree to which the coordinate is divisible by two. Thus if the coordinate you cross is divisible by 128, most of the upper microbes will change. On the other hand, if the coordinate can only be divided by 8, or 4 or 2, the shift in order is likely to be small. This shift occurs very sharply within a small fraction of a coordinate. So avoid placing kettles on such a high power of two coordinate. On the other hand, if you are searching for new microbes, place four kettles on odd numbered coordinates around the point where two lines divisible by 128 cross. This will give you four sets of well shuffled microbes.


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