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Microbe

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Microbes are employed in the process of brewing beer. Their distribution in the game is fixed and location-specific. Egyptian brewers may encounter 100 numbered microbes, coming in one of four types:

  • Yeasts are beneficial microbes which convert the sugar in a brew to alcohol. At least one yeast is required in order to make drinkable beer.
  • Acetobacter convert sugar into acetic acid (vinegar). This will ruin a brew in large enough quantities, in addition to producing a sour flavor.
  • Lactobacilli convert sugar into lactic acid, also a sour flavor.
  • Molds convert sugar into mold. Mold is flavorless, but too much of it will render a beer undrinkable.

There are 51 yeasts in the game along with 12 acetobacter, 25 lactobacilli, and 12 molds.


Microbe Characteristics

All microbes consume the sugar (glucose and maltose) in a brew, converting it into their product (either alcohol, acetic acid, lactic acid, or mold) on a 1:1 basis. This process also consumes vitamins in the brew.

The various yeasts, as the most important microbes for brewing, have their own page.

The undesirable microbes have fewer characteristics than do yeasts. For one thing, they do not produce flavors. (Acetobacter and lactobacilli do, however, produce acetic acid and lactic acid, respectively, both of which impart a sour flavor to beer.)

It appears that the undesirable microbes do have an alcohol cap, much the way yeasts do, though this only comes into play when there is an alcohol-producing yeast in the brew. In absence of alcohol, there is no limit to the amount of acid or mold a microbe can produce, provided there is enough sugar and vitamins to work with.

All microbes possess an individual glucose floor and maltose floor. These dictate the amount of sugar (glucose and maltose) which the microbe will leave uneaten in a brew.


List of Microbes


How to Determine Microbe Characteristics

By this point in Tale 5, most of the important characteristics are known for all 51 yeasts (vitamin threshold and alcohol threshold are still mostly undiscovered). How were these numbers found out? Well, here's a guide to the method Users/Hekatef used, in hopes that the process can go even quicker and smoother in Tale 6 and beyond.

All of the really important characteristics of a yeast can be sussed out using 3 tests. We're assuming here, of course, that you've already worked out a location and seal time for the yeast you want to study. Don't expect these tests to give you beer you can drink (they'll probably all end up Cloying, unless you get lucky) -- they're just for research purposes. It's best to take a screenshot of the numbers you get so you can refer to them later.

1. First Test: 100 medium malt @ 120, 100 honey @ 60. Not knowing anything about a new yeast, you first want to try a brew with a lot of sugar and vitamins, so that you can discover the absolute maximum alcohol this yeast can produce. 100 medium malt and 100 honey will give you plenty. From the results of this test, you can determine the yeast's:

  • Maximum alcohol level. Very important.
  • Growth rate. Once you know a yeast's alcohol max, you can nearly always work out whether the growth rate is 10%, 20%, 30%, or 40%.
  • Vitamin ratio. You can easily calculate the starting vitamins in the brew (2733, if you used the suggested recipe above), and then you need only subtract the vitamin level in your finished brew to figure out how many vitamins the yeast ate. Knowing how much alcohol was created, you can work out the vitamin ratio pretty easily.
  • Malt flavors. Looking at the flavor levels produced, you now know how much of each of the following flavors this yeast produces at max alcohol: Orange, Banana, Cherry, Date, Honey, Nutmeg, Cinnamon, Grassy, Nasty. Assuming you used no light or raw malt, you can conclude that all of the Grassy flavor in the brew came from yeast. For Honey flavor, you need only subtract the amount of flavor that was added by ingredients -- in the suggested recipe above, 100 honey @ 60 produces an even 1000 flavor. Thus, if your brew contains Honey flavor of 1079, you know that 79 of that flavor is the result of your yeast.

2. Second Test: 30 light malt @ 12. The sole purpose of this test is to discover the glucose and maltose floors. This recipe is extremely low-sugar, but provides enough to ensure that the sugar floors will be reached. Check your alcohol level afterwards: it should be above zero, but below the maximum for this yeast. If so, you can be confident that the yeast stopped working due to hitting the sugar floors (and not from any other factors); thus, your ending glucose and maltose are the glucose and maltose floors, respectively. (NOTE: If you have an extremely low-alcohol yeast -- one where max alcohol is less than 300 -- then 30 malt will probably be too much sugar; in those rare cases, try 20 malt instead.

3. Third Test: Wheat. Finally, run a test using only honey and wheat, so that you can determine the wheat flavors -- Bread, Grapefruit, Pear, Blackberry, Prune, Jasmine, Clove, Vanilla, Herbal -- this yeast produces at max alcohol. Design your recipe to ensure that the brew successfully hits the alcohol cap. Doing the first test again, only with wheat (100 medium wheat @ 120, 100 honey @ 60), will do it, but at this point you know enough about this yeast's characteristics that you can probably design a more economical recipe that uses fewer ingredients. Waste not, want not! It's best to avoid using light or raw wheat in your recipe; that way you can be sure that all of the Herbal flavor in the brew is the result of yeast action. Also, for your Bread flavor results, remember to subtract the amount of flavor that was produced by your wheat (this should be an easy calculation if you know what you added and when).

Congratulations! You now know everything about this yeast -- except for vitamin threshold and alcohol threshold. These features are a lot more difficult to work out, requiring multiple tests; I don't have a set strategy for them worked out at this time.


Microbe Research Data

Here is a link to a GoogleDocs spreadsheet. It contains the complete results of 65 yeast tests done on a 256x256 block in eastern Alcyone. The block is bounded by 2304, 2048 and 2560, 1792. Tests were done approximately every 32 coords. At the bottom is some summary data. Feel free to analyze it to find the pattern(s). None are apparent yet.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqC85wlkk1CfdGNPbG9jT2Etc1V2VWZrOFlfRHIxM0E#gid=0

Note that all except 3 microbes appear somewhere in the block. It is likely that all 100 appear in each block, but I am not going to do the 62K+ additional tests to confirm it. Solaris believes (and I agree) that the "seal time" probably varies instead of the distribution of the microbes. If the seal time for a microbe at a point is less than zero, that microbe does not appear in the test results for that point.

The "sort key 1" in column A sorts lines 7-71 as rows across the block, from west to east. So rows 7-14 are the northern "edge" of the block, and lines 63-71 are the southern edge of the block (one of the blocks has two locations within it). Spreadsheet rows 72-95 contain data for various points just outside the primary block.

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