"Quiescence Yeast" Or will my yeast-to-be survive a travel to the caribbean?

Question

This is a related question, but not a usefull one to me :(

I intend to buy liquid yeast from northenbrewer (WLP099 in case you wonder) and I currently live in Venezuela, a very hot and sunny place (75 F average, but it could get much hotter sometimes)

I know (suspect) the liquid yeast is already in a "quiescence state" (diploid) so it is resilient, but I would like to know "how much resilient it gets", and if it would tolerate the travel adversities.

ps: Average travel time is 2 weeks

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I have shipped much more fragile patient biological samples (which is what yeast are) from Mexico to the US for research purposes. One big issue is if they get caught up in customs. Our samples of course were red flagged because we said what they were and had all the paperwork ready and with the package (seriously don't they have anything better to do). We packed our samples on ice packs and with a short stop over in Florida in customs by the time they go to us they had no ice left. End of story was the samples were fine even though they had spent some time at room temp in Florida (80+ degrees F).

So keeping them cold especially for 2 weeks is a no go. But it is important to note that even at the temperatures that the yeast are likely to experience on the journey shouldn't kill them. Just might stress them out a bit. So once you receive your yeast make a starter culture out of them and you should be good to go. Just be prepared to wait in case they are shell shocked form the journey and use sterile technique when culturing from the liquid yeast starter. If the yeast are so stressed a lot of them die you may end up culturing local yeast/bacteria instead of your wanted yeast. But I bet it should work just fine so long as you do a starter culture.