The company supplies one of the crucial components of the beer-making process – yeast, which drives fermentation– to many of your favorite local breweries, like Perennial Artisan Ales and Rockwell Brewing Co., as well as brewers nation-wide. Soon after co-founding the company in Chicago, co-owner Mark Schwarz moved back to his hometown of St. Louis in 2015 to open a second base of operations. Since then, Omega Yeast has continued to grow, supplying yeast to over 5,000 professional and home brewers, expanding their staff to 45 employees, and developing new strains to help expand brewers’ creative capacities.
There are several things that sets this crew apart from some it its more established competitors. For a start, the liquid yeast pitches that Omega Yeast prepares for professional brewers is delivered as fresh as is biologically possible. They accomplish this by propagating the yeast beginning only when the brewer orders it. They do not prepare it in giant batches, as other companies might. This detail, along with obsessive knowledge about each strain they carry, prevents any yeast population from sitting around and losing vitality and fermentation power at either the preparation end or the brewing end of the process; it always drops to its brewer in peak condition, raring to go.
The company used a new biological tool, CRISPR, it’s kind of like a scalpel. It can take DNA from this strain that does some cool stuff and put it in this other one, and basically come up with new yeast that can produce strawberry or banana or all kinds of different flavors.
Omega Yeast has a distinctly experimental attitude, and also works closely with brewers to provide new or previously undiscovered, proven strains capable of driving aroma and flavor-forward in interesting new directions. It offers a comprehensive catalog of what it describes as “work horse” strains, those strains that brewers worldwide have been domesticating for centuries.
According to beer52.com; saucemagazine.com. Source of photo: internet
