To prep for my upcoming brew day on saturday (check back monday for results) I decided to make a yeast starter.

• to be honest, I had never made a yeast starter before, and had relied on wyeast smack packs as a sort of “mini-starter” for my batches.
• however, I have been running into some bad luck with recent smack packs that didn’t fully inflate, and one which didn’t take off at all.  this made for a headache on brew day.
• in addition, as long as I have been brewing, starters have been getting pumped to me as a good idea for a fast and vigorous fermentation.
• I am also interested in reconstituting bottle yeast in the future, and there’s no way I can do this without a starter, so I had to start sometime.
• the kicker was that my shipped brew ingredients had been sitting out in the hot sun all day yesterday, and despite being wrapped with a cold pack, my smack pack was already swollen when I got to it.  I could either let the swollen smack pack sit in the fridge for a couple days and potentially run out of nutrients or make a starter.

I recently purchased a few items for the yeast starter process.

• a 1000 mL erlenmeyer flask – realistically, you can use any type of container, but you can toss this flask right on the stove top and dump it into an ice bath without any problems.
• some yeast nutrient – I got this mostly for reconstituting yeast so they would have a proper diet.  my smack pack already had nutrient in it, so I didn’t add any to this batch.
• you will also definitely want some foam reducer, dry or liquid malt extract, and some aluminum foil.  I had all of this lying around from previous batches.
• however, you can realistically make a starter with just water and some leftover DME or LME and any container.  the stuff above just eliminates steps from the process and/or makes the process easier.

for those interested, here’s a quick breakdown of the process I followed, based on various online tutorials:

• I added DME and water to the flask in a ratio of 2 oz. DME/400mL water.  note here – if using a flask, add the DME first.  I waited until the water was boiling to add the DME – big mistake.  that stuff is like crazy glue once it gets warm and went everywhere but through the neck of the flask.

• ADD FOAM REDUCER to your flask before the boil, or you will get a gnarly boil over, or if using a flask, a wort eruption.  In my opinion, this is the most important note of the whole process.  My 600 mL starter became a 400 mL starter in about a second before I realized I forgot to add the foam reducer.

• I whipped up a quick batch of sanitizer while I was waiting for the boil to complete.  you can never be too anal/safe!

• after boiling for a little over 10 minutes, I placed the flask in an ice bath, and cooled it to about 70F.

• I then shook my smack pack and added the yeast.  I am using wyeast 2450PC – Denny’s Favorite 50.  Denny Conn is one of my favorite brew forum contributors, and I have used his recipes and followed his advice multiple times.  why not give his yeast a shot?

• after adding the yeast, I topped the flask off with some sanitized foil and shook it up.  some people use stir plates or oxygenate their starter, and some use an airlock or foam stopper.  I was going to use an airlock, but the stopper I got was too small for the flask.  william’s brewing recommends a #7 stopper for their 1000 mL flask, but you need more like a #9.5 from what I read.
• every once in a while (5-6 hrs or so) you will want to swirl the starter around to keep the yeast working.
• another note – I have heard of people making multiple batches of wort like this and canning them using a pressure cooker.  They then have sterile wort ready every time they want to make a starter!  I might have to look into that.

Tags: denny, erlenmeyer flask, foam reducer, nutrient, reconstituting bottle yeast, smack pack, williams, wyeast 2450PC, yeast starter

This entry was posted on Friday, September 4th, 2009 at 10:21 am and is filed under brewing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.