by Rick August & Shelley Whitehead
On a recent trip, we stopped to visit Wyeast Laboratories Inc., distributors of liquid brewers yeast for the home and professional brewing market. Wyeast occupies a very low-key facility in a small town a few kilometers from Hood River, Oregon. Wyeast has been in business for twenty-four years. The laboratory’s name is taken from the Multnomah language name for what is currently known as Mount Hood.
We spoke at some length with customer service manager Brian Perkey. Brian has been with Wyeast for two years, following a fifteen year career in the brewing industry in Portland, in California, and with Hood River’s Full Sail Brewing.
As home brewers will know, Wyeast Labs packages its yeast in soft packs that naturally require refrigeration in transit. Despite the very perishable nature of the product, the business is proud of its track record of successful deliveries to professionals and home brewers in destinations as far afield as western Australia, Brazil, South Africa, Norway and Italy.
Wyeast maintains a yeast bank of some 300 pure yeast strains, some of which are strains owned by the laboratory, while others are owned by brewing companies and managed under contract. At any given time about 40 strains or blends are available for distribution to home or professional brewers.
Many of the in-house yeast strains were gifted to the company by professional brewers willing to share their sugar-eating treasures with the brewing world at large. In other cases, yeast owners have licensed their strain to Wyeast, as, for example, with the Pac-Man strain, distributed under a royalty agreement with owner Rogue Breweries of Newport, Oregon.
In some cases, the company’s capacity to isolate pure strains has allowed it to recover contaminated or degraded samples – a recent example was the isolation a 120 year-old heritage strain from Hawaii from a three-year old sample.
The yeast propagation process results in the company producing, in effect, many small scale batches of beer. Packaging of yeast slurries is done on site. Wyeast has a total of 19 employees in management, production and distribution.
