Yeast Culture Developer

As any desperate college student will attest, it’s difficult to make wine or beer without yeast. Fruit or grains put into a bottle simply won’t turn into your favorite drink unless yeast is there to convert carbohydrates into alcohol. Certain strains of yeast do the job efficiently, without adding an unwanted flavor to the beverage. A Yeast Culture Developer finds those yeast cultures and helps them grow.

When you arrive at work as a Yeast Culture Developer, the laboratory counters may be covered with glasses of fermenting beer and the air may smell vaguely of baking bread. You eat before you come to work so the smell won’t make you hungry.

The workday starts when your boss gives you a list of attributes to look for. Perhaps you’ll look for yeast cells of a certain shape, or those that clump together. Using small pipettes, you take a sample from each glass and place a bit of beer on a glass slide. You then examine the slides, looking for yeast cells that match the description.

Yeast cells are greedy, hungry creatures, so, as a Yeast Culture Developer, you prepare a place for them to grow and thrive. Grabbing your pipette once more, you take a sample from the beer glass with the best yeast, and then you squirt beer on the growing medium. When cells grow, you transfer them to another growing medium and then to a flask.

Beer Makers and Winemakers will want a lot of yeast to do their work, so you do all you can to make plenty of yeast. You pump yeast from flasks to tanks to barrels, and then you add dry ice to preserve the yeast you’ve grown so carefully.