Hi all,

A quick type-up of my notes for the evening - Stan, Alex, will you take responsibility for making sure they end up online somewhere (other than on the list archive)?

1) Our technical setup is good to go - temperature monitoring, logging and graphing all work, all components have been integrated, and Frank is assembling a deployable setup for next week.

2) We have two established cultures: one from Francisco's vinegar production, and one from Rikke's Three Stone Hearth strain. A batch of each was made on Aug 4th - 1.5L and 3L, respectively - both batches seemed very under-fermented (almost no yeasty flavor, little acidity, almost no sugar) upon tasting today, and had developed exceptionally thick pellicles for the relatively short duration of the fermentation. There was some discussion as to the possible explanations for this, and generally agreement that the most likely is the primary sugar source used (corn rather than cane), and the differing chemical composition of different sugars.

3) Alex purchased 8lbs of sugar for the project - thank you, Alex! =)  We added 60g and 120g of pure white cane sugar to the 1.5L and 3L batches of kombucha from last week to boost the fermentation process - the immediate CO2 development and evolution of a distinct yeasty aroma indicates healthy cultures.

4) A potential line of inquiry that could be pursued with minimal analytic equipment would be the comparison across cultures of the influence of different sugar sources on the pellicle development, measured as the wet weight of the pellicle at time of sampling. Influence of sugar source (again across cultures) on pH would also be simple, as would the relationship of both characteristics to temperature profile.

5) Last, but not least, Alex will not be commuting through the East Bay on a weekly basis anymore, and wants to set up a Fermentation Station at Noisebridge. There is strong historical basis and social support for this project, and we anticipate that it will be well receive. As an initial test of this theory, we will prepare a 15L batch for the NB fundraiser on Aug 15th. For this purpose, we have taken 4lbs of sugar, the jar of oolong tea, and two buckets from our supplies at CCL. In addition, we will need to acquire (or bring from home for now): kombucha starter, a 2gal soup pot, something to stir with, a kitchen scale, filter cloth (muslin or similar), a bunch of bottles, caps and a capper, and possibly a dedicated mini fridge.

That's everything on my notepad - anything to add, anyone?

/Rikke

On Fri, Aug 1, 2014 at 1:57 PM, Francisco Jimenez <francisco@tucanvinegars.com> wrote:

Thank you Rikke and friends of cross-pollination.

I first apologize all of you guys for no to be involved in all events and mettings of the group but I need to say that I have a lot of things dealing with at the same time, specially I am looking for a part time job plus re-colated my vinegar workplace and some other thing consuming time and energy.

I need to let you know guys that I brought a some glasses, a big mouth 1 gallon container and a scoby made out of a vinegration process and I think it is interesting for us to work with it. I put it inside the refrigerato, that one that it is alone at the Sudo kitchen. It is in a small glass container at the refrigerator's door. I leveled it.

I going to be around the SR those days in the afternoon available if some of you guys want to contact me for just talking about anything relate to the colective.

Thank you very much all of you and I hope to see you on Monday,

Francisco

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Monday 7/21 activity & followup
From: Rikke Rasmussen <rikke.c.rasmussen@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, July 31, 2014 3:34 pm
To: Francesco Capodieci <fgcapo@gmail.com>
Cc: stan@ana.com, Francisco Jimenez <francisco@tucanvinegars.com>, Alex
Alekseyenko <alex.alekseyenko@gmail.com>, biohackers@lists.sudoroom.org

Awesome, Frank, thank you so much for the cross-pollination effort, and my sincerest apologies for not being there in person to support said effort!

Speaking of cross-pollination, I went to the Counter Culture Labs meeting last week - they are still very focused on building out their space and attracting new members/projects to fill it, so they were very eager to accommodate the Fermentation Station. That said, they do also have rent to cover, so I made the agreement on our collective behalf that we would pony up the cash for 2 reduced-rate memberships ($25, I believe...possibly only $20, my notes are unclear) in return for a dedicated portion of the outer space for our set-up.

As for SF Biohackers, Matt Harbowy (founding member and primary financial baclker for CCL) also proposed that we could trek out to the Sunset to check out his home lab - it could probably fit 10-12 folks in a meeting situation, maybe 6-8 working in clusters...I've only seen it once about 6 months ago, so my memory is a little fuzzy, but it sounds like a sweet setup, and may be worth checking out?

Last, but not least - I think we have the clear makings of 3 separate sub-projects/groups that all tie together, focusing on 1) the gastronomical aspects of kombucha/vinegar/beer/yogurt/kefir/etc. production (that would looking at the correlations between environmental conditions and chemical/flavor profiles), 2) the molecular aspects of same (such as species identification and characterization, manipulating species composition, looking at cellulose production, and engineering individual species for specific chemical/nutritional/etc. profiles, and 3) the technical development of bioreactors/cultivators for all of these awesome microbes.

Anyhow. Sorry for being a total flake this week, will endeavor to do better next week. See you on Monday!

/Rikke

On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 9:44 PM, Francesco Capodieci <fgcapo@gmail.com> wrote:

I met with a couple of people from the following group who are interested coming to our meeting next Monday:

http://www.meetup.com/SF-Biohackers-Meetup/

They are interested not only in bioreactors but in genetically modifying kombucha yeast.  We agreed to put ideas and research into a wiki.  Stan, is Sudo Room's wiki a good place for this?

I will have some progress on the (sensor -> arduino -> raspi -> web browser) setup to show next week.

Frank

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