Is it legal to recover yeast from commercial ale?

[andybiochem]

Hi!

Just a quick one - by buying a bottle of real ale, does that then make me the owner of all the contents of the bottle, including specifically the yeast? I.e. will the yeast be covered by any sort of commercial protection (patent, trade laws etc).

More to the point, if I were to say that I'd recovered yeast from brewery X for my own beers (commercial or not), would X then be able to challenge me about it?

Ta!

[trucker5774]

I can't see any problem. You have bought it, it's yours to do as you please, other than the normal licensing laws for resale etc. You are not brewing something to pass off as a counterfeit.

[floydmeddler]

I wouldn't be surprised if lots of the newer breweries do just this!

[unclepumble]

I'm not 100% sure on the legalities of it but whitelabs and Wyeast have based their businessed on just that practise, and brewers have been borrowing each others yeasties for years.

A german did it on a visit to Burton in the 1800's by dipping his specially adapted waking cane in the bass fermenting Vats, as well as at a few other brewerys,

I wouldn't bother much If you can get it to go just use it.

UP

[boingy]

My first reaction, and the common bleedin' sense answer, is that of course it is legal. How can it be wrong?

But the law is not always about common sense.
And then I think about the increasingly common occurrence of garden plants being covered by Plant Breeders' Rights:

http://fera.defra.gov.uk/plants/plantVa ... /index.cfm

You buy a plant from the garden centre and it comes with a warning that says "Propagation illegal without a licence". As far as I can tell this only applies to propagation for commercial gain which begs the question why is it on the plants we ordinary bods buy from a retail garden centre?

I've never heard of any such law about yeast but I bet that's just because no-one has got round to making that law yet.

If you do decide to "borrow" a yeast strain, use it commercially and tell everyone, then I suggest you choose a small and cash-poor brewery as the target rather than a brewery that can afford a lawyer!

[Dennis King]

if its illegal then I'm in the shit, can I have several hundred other cases taken into account m'lord

[unclepumble]

If that was the case with Yeast White Labs Wyeast and brewlabs would not be in business, Brewlabs will sell you all sorts of strains of yeast if you tell them what you are trying to make, they won't tell you the name of the brewery it has come from, and will sell it under a brewlabs brand name as do white labs and wyeast, but the majority of the strains they sell are from commercial strains. Do you think they obtained all these strains by asking nicely for them, some yes but not all.

To be safe use your commercial strain where ever you got it from, and say nothing about its origin, it will take a lot of work to identify it to a particular strain, and to be honest, if your repitching it a lot, chances are it will have mutated some anyhow and will then be unique to your brewery.

UP

[piet_v]

However, downloading a yeast is illegal ofcours !!

[Wolfy]

On one of the TBN podcasts Chris White talks about the subject of yeast strain 'ownership'.
It has been some time since I listened to it, but from memory he said that essentially since all brewing yeast is virtually the same organism there is no real way to legally own, copyright, protect or otherwise restrict others from using an individual 'specialty' strain of yeast.

However, there are respectful and self/industry imposed guidelines on such matters, WhiteLabs/Wyeast/Brewlab do not directly say "this yeast belongs to this brewery" likely that is to avoid any legal issues which it seems would be very difficult to prove either way.

On the other hand Coopers Brewery in Australia acknowledge that the yeast in the bottle is the yeast they ferment with, and (I think) even provide instructions on how to re-culture and reuse that yeast, it is certain that it is something they are aware of since even the BJCP guidelines say the yeast "must be cultured from bottle sediment".

[andybiochem]

On one of the TBN podcasts Chris White talks about the subject of yeast strain 'ownership'.
It has been some time since I listened to it, but from memory he said that essentially since all brewing yeast is virtually the same organism there is no real way to legally own, copyright, protect or otherwise restrict others from using an individual 'specialty' strain of yeast.

However, there are respectful and self/industry imposed guidelines on such matters, WhiteLabs/Wyeast/Brewlab do not directly say "this yeast belongs to this brewery" likely that is to avoid any legal issues which it seems would be very difficult to prove either way.

On the other hand Coopers Brewery in Australia acknowledge that the yeast in the bottle is the yeast they ferment with, and (I think) even provide instructions on how to re-culture and reuse that yeast, it is certain that it is something they are aware of since even the BJCP guidelines say the yeast "must be cultured from bottle sediment".

Nice one!

Thanks for all the replies!

[coatesg]

I suspect part of WL/Wyeast not saying where they came from is respect, and part of it is some sort of trade descriptions (ie - yeast behaves differently to in the actual brewery (size/shape fermenters, temps, water, etc) or the original yeast is multi-strain and theirs is a single one (Ringwood, Brakspear, etc))

The plant breeders thing actually has a license on the plant you buy - bottles of beer do not. (Most bottles will be using strains you can buy anyhow - a *lot* of UK breweries (esp micros) use S-04, Nottingham, US05, etc for ease of use.