A lot of these brewers are trying to get as many local products as they can into their beer, whether it's local hops or barley that's grown in the state. Local yeast is the next thing they're missing.
Matt Bochman has combined his scientific work with his love of brewing in the new business Wild Pitch Yeast.
As it is, brewers use just a handful of the hundreds of thousands of varieties of yeast that exist in the natural world. Bochman wants to increase the number of strains brewers have access to, paving the way for an even more local beer.
And in this case, he says ‘local' could literally mean your backyard.
In this week's podcast, he describes how he harvests wild yeast and isolates the beer-brewing strains in his lab. Do you want to make a beer with the yeast from that tree in your backyard or the yeast in your kid's hair? Wild Pitch can help you do that.