Beer made from belly button fluff has a bit of the brewer in every glass
The day you've been waiting for has finally arrived: Belly Button Beer is now a thing.
A group of brewers from Australia have produced beer with yeast grown from their very own belly button fluff. You can't make this stuff up.
Why anyone would want to drink this beer is confusing enough; why anyone would want to collect their belly button fluff to make a beer is a whole other issue.
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Belly Button Beer, as it is obviously called, sounds like a disgusting idea mates would come up with after a night on the cans. But this is not the case for the guys at Melbourne's 7 Cent Brewery who actually put science to work for this interesting concept.
Brewers Doug Bremner, Matthew Boustead and Brendan Baker had been experimenting with finding new places to source yeast for their "spontaneously fermented beer," which is a Belgian-style way of brewing that sees beer put in big shallow vats with natural yeast and bacteria from the air fermenting the beer.
"That started us with the idea of experimenting with trying to cultivate and culture up our own yeast and while we were doing that we thought it would be kinda fun to swab other things," Bremner told Mashable Australia. "[There are] fruits and things around the brewery and we thought 'why don't we try belly button fluff and see what happens'."
Belly Button Beer started its life like most things of science, in a petri dish. The brewers swabbed samples of each of their belly buttons and then put the samples on agar plates, which is where things of beauty can grow.
"After allowing the plates to incubate, we found all sorts of interesting things growing, including what appeared to be colonies of yeast," the guys wrote in a statement on their website. "Positive controls were used to help us identify yeast colonies and negative controls were used to ensure our techniques were sterile. We selected individual yeast colonies and grew them up until we had pitchable quantities for trial batches."
Yum.
Bremner said he was as surprised as the rest of us. "We weren't really sure if trying to get yeast from a belly button fluff would actually work," he said. "So we were kind of surprised when we managed to isolate a yeast strain and we did test batches and we were like 'wow, this is actually yeast and it has actually worked'."
To offset the taste of belly buttons, the brewers also added some flavours such as orange zest and coriander, along with a lot of hops. The final result is a Belgian-ish Witbier with a very personalised twist to keep things interesting.
It was inspired by the Oregon brewer, Rogue Ales, who produced a Beard Beer fermented with yeast taken from the brewer’s beard. "That kind of got us thinking of crazy ideas and other places you can get yeast from," Bremner said. The problem is that beards are in fashion and belly buttons are, well, not.
Despite it sounding like a terribly disgusting thing, Bremner made it clear that this brew is no more dirty than any other beer. Even vagina beer. You see, yeast is yeast.
"Quite understandably, people get grossed out by the whole idea," he said. "It all starts from that yeast cell and as long as we maintain sterile conditions, there is no contamination. The fact that it did come from a very dirty place, doesn't really matter because it is just a pure colony of yeast. Which is what every other brewery uses in their beer anyway."
Bremner said the key thing is that Belly Button Beer contains a unique yeast strain. "I can guarantee there is no other beer in the world that will taste exactly like this beer because it is our yeast and we have cultivated it up," he said.
The special beer has been produced specifically for the 2016 Great Australasian Beer SpecTAPular (GABS), which in a previous year has seen the 7 Cent Brewery enter their ultimate "hipster beer" made with kale, quinoa and chia seeds. But it has nothing on the wonders of Belly Button Beer.
The beer festival is a great place for the team to push the boundaries with the creation of beer and come up with an innovative concept to see if it sticks. Belly Button Beer, the beer for every true beer connoisseur who can get past the fact they are drinking someone's naval fluff.
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Jenni Ryall is Mashable's VP of Content Strategy. She spends her time launching cool, new things such as Mashable Deals and Mashable Reels. On the other days, she is developing strong partnerships with companies including Apple News, Flipboard, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and Reddit.
