Skip to main content

Saving Money: Simple Yeast Culturing Part II



The tools you will need.
I realize it's been a couple of months since I posted actual brewing advice. Today that all changes with another installment on yeast culturing.

Back in June, I wrote a blog on a Simple Yeast Culturing technique that allows you to reuse yeast from previous batches of beer. The simple method I presented required that you re-pitch the yeast within a month or so of cultivating it. But what happens if you wait longer to reuse? Well, you have to do a little extra work to bring the yeast out of hibernation.

Rousing older yeast isn't terribly complicated. Before pitching your hibernating yeast into a new batch of beer, you have to get it going the day before with a starter made from fresh, sterile wort. Here's a rundown of the procedure:
Yeast joins the fresh Wort.
  1. Mix 1/4-1/3 cup of DME (Dry Malt Extract) with 2 cups of water.
  2. Boil the mixture for 10-15 minutes to sterilize.
  3. Cool the fresh wort to 70F.
  4. Pour the wort into a sterilized container (a growler works great for this).
  5. Pitch the hibernating yeast into the cooled wort.
  6. Cover the container with sterilized aluminum foil and leave it out at room temperature.
  7. Swirl the liquid occasionally to keep oxygen flowing to the yeast.
  8. After 24 hours or so, the starter will be bubbling and ready to pitch into a fresh batch of beer.
Waiting for the magic to start.
Are there more scientific ways of doing this? Yep. Plus, there are lots of excellent guides out there if full-on yeast culturing sparks your interest. But for simply getting your old yeast going, this method works beautifully.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Kitchen Brewing Part 3: Sparge and Boil

The mash emerges from the oven. Now that we're finished with Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, it's time to Sparge. As you can see from the photo, the grains have absorbed a lot of liquid. In a traditional all-grain setup, your Mash Tun has a valve at the bottom to release the first running of Wort. The grains are then rinsed with the sparge water to extract any remaining sugars. My stove-top method doesn't afford such luxury, so a different method is called for. The grains have gained a little weight. There are a couple of choices at this point. One choice is to lift the grain bag out of Pot A and place it into the sparge water in Pot B to steep for 10-15 minutes or more. The other is to lift the grain bag up, put a colander under it and slowly pour the sparge water through the grains into the original pot. I prefer the former, because I get a better extraction rate from my grains. All that absorption means that the grains weigh a lot more than they did going i
2 comments
Read more

Kitchen Brewing Part 2: The Mash

Always start your session with a beer. Now that the equipment is together from Part 1 , it's time to start brewing. I'll be brewing an English India Pale Ale for my demo batch. The beer's details will be out in a future blog. Ingredients ready to go. I'm lucky to have a homebrew shop with a grain mill, so I've crushed my grains at the store. The hops have also been measured out ahead of time to keep things simple. You don't have to do this, but I recommend it. My setup. My stove-top setup is pretty simple. Two kettles, a grain bag and a metal spatula are pretty much it. I also like using a hop bag (available for around $5.00), but it's completely optional. If you're doing all-grain brewing, canning pots work best for batches of 2.5 gallons or less. Anything larger and you'll be battling spill-overs. They also work well for partial-mash batches of up to 5 gallons, where you can top off your wort after the boil. We hav
Post a Comment
Read more

Saving Money: Simple Yeast Culturing

A few members of the family I just finished racking my English IPA to a secondary fermentor. As part of the process, I saved some of the yeast in the primary for future use. Here then, is the start of a series of articles on yeast culturing. Back in the "good old days," homebrewers didn't have a ton of yeast choices. In some cases, brewers would even use bread yeast from the baking section of the grocery store. In practice, you hydrated the packet of dry yeast you got at the homebrew or grocery store and pitched it. The packets were cheap and worked, but there wasn't much variety to be had. Nowadays, there are several dozen strains available. While a few strains are still dry , most are liquids that come in pitchable tubes , or smack-packs . The liquid yeasts give consistent results and provide tremendous variety to finished beers, but are pricey. If you only use each pack, or tube once, you will quickly discover that yeast makes up 15%, or more of the cost
Post a Comment
Read more