Day 10:  Well today I started out helping junior put the hammer mill back together after it got a facelift and a paint job.  We got about half way and then I got called away for my weekly meeting.  I had a good talk with Kris about the rest of the internship and what would be happening this week. 

 Kris decided it would be a good idea to learn some of the science behind yeast and fermentation.  I met up with two of his current grad students, Adam Jaros and Jake seen here in the second picture.  We started out this session by learning how to use a Gas Chromatograph.  This machine takes a sample of a fermented mash, heats it into a gas, and then reads the relative levels of compounds created during fermentation by the yeast.  This way you can tell how much of any given compound like iso-amyl alcohol, methanol, or acetone you are creating.  The goal of the study I am a part of is to find yeast strains which will give you a higher yield of your desired compounds and a lower yield of the undesired.  This may even lead to the possibility of creating a fermentation which has the compounds most often found in a spirit only after aging.  This is a bit of a long shot for the future, but who knows.  Anyway, this second picture is Adam on the left and Jake on the right.  Adam is showing us how to operate the GC.  After this Adam taught us to make a control sample.  These are often used to calibrate a method for the GC to search for compounds you want to find.

 The test run of the GC takes about 16 minutes, the picture below is a screen shot of the test about half way through.  You can see the big spike, which is ethanol, shows up in the largest quantity at the about the 5 minute mark.

 Tomorrow, Adam and I are going to be using the machine in picture 4, which is a small fermentation device. It has the ability to test for, and control the ph of the fermentation on the fly by adding an acid or a base automatically.  We will be studying a few different strains of yeast and how they are affected by different temperatures.  The goal of this part of the internship is to give me a basic understanding of the science behind mashing and fermenting.  As Kris put it, when you get started in fermenting you will run into problems.  One needs to be able to determine the cause and the cure.  He did say, he didn't expect me to go out and buy all of this equipment for myself.  I should however, know what is wrong and be able to send off samples for testing to someone like him and stay involved in the diagnosis and repair.  I'll try and give you some more details about tomorrow and get some more detailed pictures of the process.