#beerscopy

Adventures into beerscopy aka microscopy / coming soon…

useful links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microscopy

You don’t have to be a pro or work in some lab to be able to enjoy this field and employ it even beyond beer, it would be a little bit of a waste of equipment imo.

Everything below is my opinion:

buying a used older but quality Brand with good optics is better than buying a new cheapo microscope (even if the new one might be cheaper or have extra features than the older one). Olympus, Nikon, etc.. are recommended – I have a good source for this, Contact me if you want help or eBay it.
Read the manual for your microscope and get familiar with how it works, also watching a introductory HowTo video on youtube is highly recommended in general.
Learn how to prepare slide specimen samples – again YouTube will teach you a bunch – search for it
Learn how to focus on your sample, once you have it prepared, note: its very important to understand all your optics and the fact that the 100X optic is the only one that can utilize an immersion oil – you need to fully understand that if you get this oil into any other optics other than the 100x which has been designed and sealed, it will ruin those other optics, as they are “not” sealed, like the 4x, 10x, 40x, etc… You also need to understand the benefits that the immersion oil provides and yes you can view without it, but you loose a lot of the benefits of this lens. Note: if you were to take a biology class, you would never pass without knowing how to use oil.

5. when not using the microscope, keep it in a secure and clean area, put a plastic dust cover over microscope, learn how to maintain the optics (how to clean them) and how to care for the microscope. Example, I have the Olympus CH2 which came out in about 1986 – so this thing is over 30 years old and it is still an excellent scope, made to precision with quality parts and optics.

6. Can you get a quality score from China, probably if it was license by the right company, like say Leica, but any off Brand names, be careful, they are made cheaply and their part tolerances are a joke – you get what you pay for as they say.

So – actually I lied, step 1 is to learn about microscopes in general, this guy will explain it well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKeOuec2KVY

BEER related content will be posted below in the near future:

Here are some pics of dried yeast left on a specimen slide:

( left 100x, right 40x magnification ), someone said it looked like Europe!

LINKS:

Counting cells – https://www.craftbrewingbusiness.com/news/watch-white-labs-teaches-craft-brewers-how-to-count-yeast-cells/

PICTURES:

some yeast sample from active fermentation, showing the difference of using immersion oil vs. not on the 100x oil lens. Clearly shows a lot more details and even points that were not visible when using no oil.