Don’t worry, the following post will not gross you out and is completely SWF…maybe?

Yeast Infection is simply the name that we use to label our adventures through brewing, baking, cooking, and travelling. The name was originally coined by Beth to describe our homebrew; however, its roots go much deeper than that.

The very beginnings of Yeast Infection started in my (Nick’s) kitchen in 2015. I had just watched the Michael Pollen Netflix documentary, “Cooked” and became very interested in the episode about fermentation. I don’t know what it was about fermentation that piqued my interest, but the rest is history. I quickly googled how to make a sourdough starter and went from there.

It amazed me how all I had to do was mix flour and water in a bowl on the counter, let it sit, and eventually it would become a bubbling, tangy, living creature that had the power to turn flour, water, and salt into a complex and flavorful loaf of bread. However, I soon learned that it wasn’t just about mixing ingredients together. Though bread appears to be a simple four ingredient recipe, it is quite possibly one of the most difficult things to master. Four years and countless loaves later, I am still learning to tame my original sourdough “beast” and bend it to reach my own version of Eldorado: the perfect loaf of bread.

About two years ago, my roommate (Beth) and I decided to try our hands at brewing beer. What started out as a little experiment has now erupted into something close to an unhealthy obsession. There is rarely a time in our apartment when there isn’t a 5-gallon bucket of beer fermenting in the closet, a carboy lagering in the chest freezer, or bottles conditioning on the shelf.

In between all of this, I tried my hand (with less success) at fermenting vegetables like sauerkraut and pickles. Though the sauerkraut has always come out with veritable levels of success, the pickles have been…well, a work in progress.

You might be wondering why we actually chose the name Yeast Infection to brand all of this… And, I am not sure there is a clear cut answer other than we thought, in our off-kilter senses of humor, that it was funny. However, over time, Yeast Infection has come to embody more than just the fermentation experiments that happen in our kitchen or an inappropriate sense of humor. It has come to encapsulate the fact that we have, in fact, been kind of infected with the “yeast bug”.

People talk about the “travel bug” and how once a person starts travelling, he or she can’t stop. This is similar with the “yeast bug”. Once we started baking sourdoughs, brewing beer, and fermenting vegetables, it all started to percolate into our lives. We started to drink beer and visit breweries not simply for the alcohol, but because we were genuinely interested in the flavors, the complexities, and the process. The same goes for bread and the other fermentables.

Yeast and fermentation have influenced what we order at bars, what we eat at restaurants, what we cook at home, and where we choose to travel. In this way, Yeast Infection is more than just a thing you go to the doctor to treat. It is finding life and experience through the things we eat and drink.

At this point, I think we are still figuring out what Yeast Infection truly means in a structured format like this content machine. Therefore, sorry for the clutter as we start to hone in on what all of this actually is. In the meantime, thanks for stopping by, and I hope you enjoy what we have to share.