Modeling Fermentation Through Open Science, with Curro Polo

Curro Polo is currently pursuing an industrial PhD in the Basque Culinary Center program, with the academic guidance of Harvard University. His research project is taking place at Ama Brewery, where he is on the R&D team with Chef Ramón Perisé Moré who we interviewed recently. Curro is exploring the fascinating world of microbiology as it applies to beverages. We’d met at the 2024 KBI conference in Reno, Nevada, where Curro and I were both Kombucha Kup judges. At that time, he was finishing up his Master’s in Gastronomy and Culinary Arts at Harvard. I reported on his Master’s thesis, Kombucha: A Word on Metamorphosis, in March 2025.

Curro has launched a campaign to fund the first experiments of his PhD project: Open Flavor: Modeling Fermentation Through Open Science. The goal is to scale and model fermentation processes for the No/Lo (low and no alcohol) beverage category using open science and open source tools. The idea is to rethink fermentation beyond traditional beer and wine, exploring substrates like teas, and to make all methods, data, and tools openly available. He will utilize platforms such as the Pioreactor, an open source mini bioreactor. Expanding the cluster will enable him to conduct stronger, reproducible experiments that benefit both science and industry.

The Pioreactor

The Pioreactor is an affordable and user-friendly bioreactor that is flexible and easy to scale. It’s an open source tool for controlled micro-fermentations where variables such as pH, oxygen, temperature, and agitation can be precisely managed. Micro-fermentations of 20ml not only provide fast, cost-effective, and reproducible data generation but also create a foundation for predictive models that can be scaled to industrial production. This approach brings both scientific rigor and competitive advantages to the No/Lo industry.

A bioreactor is basically a machine that helps you to create an environment where you can control temperature, the movement, or whatever liquid is inside. You can also control what kind of other liquids you would put in the liquid for a pumping system. And then it also has a system, which is called optical density, that it measures how fast your cells are growing in that liquid, right? Because there’s many ways to approach fermentation, right? How I like to imagine fermentation is like a system, there’s a box and in that box you have a liquid, and that liquid has different compounds.

Initial work will focus on three non-Saccharomyces yeasts relevant for No/Lo beverages. We will systematically vary temperature, pH, oxygen, stirring speed, and tea substrate to assess strain performance. Growth curves and CO₂ production, measured directly in the Pioreactor, will provide high-resolution insights into metabolic activity and fermentatio