Title pretty much says it all. The gross hemisphere of my brain was thinking idly and wondered the titular question. Is it possible? Has it been done? Thanks for humoring my strange curiosity.
They made beer that way: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=23562
Whether or not that’s actually true is another story.
Cecil has you covered.
Edit: whoops, it isn’t Cecil, but one of his slaves.
Edit 2: whoops, multiple slaves.
It appears the beer in question was made with regular brewer’s yeast, using only a “trace amount” of vaginal yeast. And even so, it sounds mighty suspicious. How did this woman even verify what she was adding to the beer was yeast? She doesn’t provide any details.
Brewer’s yeast is spent, it is a byproduct of beer, not an instigator.
At least the kind you buy in stores.
brewer’s yeast is what a brewer uses to make beer, it is alive. also what a wine maker would use, though some difference from beer types.
nutritional yeast can contain spent brewer’s yeast.
Just for the record, I don’t think that’s so disgusting or gross. Vaginas are nice places to visit!
I agree, but unfortunately we’re talking about infected vaginas here, which makes it a little more questionable.
The yeast is present in healthy clean vaginas. Just use your fresh bread water as a douche prior to mixing it with the bread. If the bread doesn’t rise you may have to resort to commercial yeast but you need to give it a bit more time as it will not be as concentrated. If it turns green or moldy Try the lady down the street.
I was going to wave my fists in the air and yell and be angry and go HEY CANDIDA ALBICANS IS A TOTALLY DIFFERENT ORGANISM THAN BLAHBLAH but then I remembered a friend of mine’s work.
Turns out vagina yeast can actually produce ethanol after all. So, there’s that.
And in healthy throats and noses and intestines. It’s only a problem when it grows out of control.
The problem is going to be isolating it from all the other flora such as staphylococcus, etc, which are naturally present on the skin - I guess the way to do it would be to swab a sample onto agar and culture it there for a while, then pick out a sample from an identified colony, reculture etc until pure.
Excellent point. You would likely end up with, at best, sourdough. Or much worse.
One time I made a batch of beer-the yeast that I added wasn’t doing much…so I added some bread yeast.
Boy was that beer horrible (thin, sour, terrible).
Sourdough can be made using “wild yeast” - that is, just leave the wet dough out for exposure to the air, and let whatever lands on it culture it. I know for sure that fecal coliforms are in the air anywhere you have people or animals… probably, anything that can be found anywhere on or in a person is also in the air around us. And yet, I don’t see recipes for these wild sourdoughs cautioning you about them going bad, etc. - even when starter cultures can be kept alive for months or years.
Perhaps someone who is an expert with microbiology can explain the exact mechanism, but it seems clear that the medium (flour, water, salt) favors just a few types of organisms that we actually want and these outcompete anything else that might mix in.
I hear that beer is not anywhere near so forgiving, though.
Depends on what you mean by “bad.”
I find it interesting that things like beer, wine, some cheeses, vinegar and even bread, not to mention lots of weird foods throughout the world, are basically just spoiled foods that spoiled in a way that preserved them from worse spoilage and kept them palatable. And nobody really understood why or how it worked until the microscope was invented.
I’ve made sourdough cultures from wild-captured yeast; sometimes, they go foul and stinky at an early stage and you have to throw them out, but once you’ve got them on a roll, they tend to self-regulate - they typically comprise a collection of different strains of yeasts and bacteria (for example lactobacillus), which outcompete any incoming nasties by weight of numbers, and by their own tendency to acidify the mixture.
I did some reading. Beer yeast is a strain designed to work slowly and bring out subtle flavors. Bread yeast is bred to work fast, but can produce yucky flavors that won’t matter in bread. But will in beer, as you discovered.
And we’re back to the OP.