Oh, hi. Hi there. It's your weird step cousin, Allie Ward, rumbling up to the family barbecue in a transam, and offering you your first room temperature beer.

Are you ready to get Yeasty?

Okay, good. So this episode touches on something that is all over and inside you, devouring your garbage.

Single-celled fungus that covers every surface of the planet. Yeast. It's also in beer. And I got a hot tip by being alive, that people like beer.

And so on a recent trip to Portland, I was very generously chauffeured through the woods and to the shore on a road trip by the wonderful sister duo and my own personal merch queens, Shannon Feltis and Bonnie Dutch.

And they had an in at Rogue Brewery in Newport, Oregon. I got a tour and I sat down to chat with a microbiologist and food scientist about zymology, the study and science and practice of fermentation people, which is how you take a sack of grain and water and turn it into dads.

Wash away the workday elixir. Now before I take you on a quick tour, I want to confess two things. Number one, I used to pour beer on myself as a child in the shower, more on that in a minute.

Number two, I read all your reviews on iTunes and I silently thank each and every one of you. So this podcast is 100% independently made. A lot of people, I guess didn't know that.

So listeners pay to keep it going through life sustaining Patreon donations at patreon.com slash allergies and also by buying merch at allergies merch.com and also for supporting for free by rating and reviewing and subscribing on iTunes, which boosts it in the charts.

It helps the podcast get seen by other people. So we remain in the top 30 or so science podcast totally independently on iTunes in September. And last week, allergies broke its own download record. It truly means it worlds me and this project is my favorite thing I've ever worked on.

So I love that you guys love the show and are spreading the word. So each week I read a snippet of a review that really made my day and at least 1021 said I love this podcast so much.

Some episodes I start listening to and have no interest in the topic and by the end I'm so fascinated and intrigued. For example, I almost skipped the theology because fish who cares. And that was my favorite episode to date.

Okay, back to psychology. So the word comes from the Greek naturally for the workings of fermentation. It's pretty straightforward. Zymol.

And Louis Pesto was the first zymologist. He was the first person to get the yeasts were making fermentation happened. Oh, also the reason I showered myself in course as a child is because beer was supposed to make hair shiny. And I had llama hair and even my parents were like sure man, try it.

Do whatever you got to do and it didn't work. And to be honest, I've never really loved beer. But I have mad respect for the craft of it and the bubbly yeasty science of it. And I'm fascinated by the history and the role that beer plays in good old American culture.

So I visited this brewery to find out how beer is made in both small and big scale batches and to chat with someone who is truly deeply knowledgeable about tiny funguses.

So amid some forklift, beeping and tasting room, hollering in the background, we walked through a maze of like these 20 foot metal tanks, storing and fermenting beers.

That's a lot of brusquies, dude. We learned some basics.

I don't know how familiar are with home brewing. None. Zero. That's basically all the CO2 blow off. So is it's preventing it's bubbling out? Yeah.

So that's where it burps and farts. Yeah, pretty much. I sniffed some yeasts, got some right business. And I learned that the staff of this brewery gets to pick their own titles.

So I was told this by a guy named Jake who is technically rogues level 10 spirits wizard. It's on his business card. He showed me a warehouse of aging whiskies and charred oak barrels.

And we won't get into that much in this episode, but I will leave you with a takeaway from him that the opening of a barrel of aging spirits is called the bunghole. And they smell delicious.

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