I am bumping up my starter volume to a gallon. I buy liquid yeast and make large starter with DME to make lotsa yeast. This way I have plenty of “virgin” yeast not contaminated with hops etc. I have the small wide mouth bubblers for this. It occurred to me why not try and make beer from it. I recognize this goes against current and conventional thinking. Normally I do my starters on stir plates at room temp or higher. My stir plate warms starter slightly. Tasted the beer and its terrible but I thought maybe its combination of it being green beer and high fermentation temp. Thought about treating it like a regular brew with all dry hopping. No stir plate and temperature controlled lower, primary till no gravity drop then move to secondary dry hop then bottle. Wondering if anyone has tried this? Do I have to do a one hour boil of the DME solution?
I often make a small beer ( low ABV&IBU) in a gallon jug. Then harvest the yeast for a full size brew. I haven’t made a starter in years. If om lazy I’ll buy to packages of yeast. The only time i do starters is to build up harvested dregs but that is getting unnecessary with all the strains out there
Sounds plausible… but then you’d want to make it a small brew…
Typically… a yeast starter is low gravity… as you are helping the yeast build up reserves for when its pushed into action…
I know… we harvest AFTER fermentation is over… but then are we exhausting the yeast? Were it could start to mutate into an undesirable off flavored concoction?
I’ll follow along as you X-beerment this approach!.. Push the envelope and see what happens… Isn’t that whats been happening to beer for centuries anyways?
Sneezles61
No you do not have to boil DME or LME. It was already wort before becoming an extract. You only have to bring it to 159F for a few minutes to fully pasteurize it. Also most people on here have moved away from stir plates and nowhere shaking instead of stirring. The results seem to be better,
If your worried about hop debris bag your hops because to make anything decent you need some hot side hop addition. If your that worried about hops debris you could wash the collected yeast
Or just not worry about hop debris.
@mikem what are you trying to accomplish by making so much yeast? In many instances under pitching yeast is more desirable IMO as it lets the yeast truly express its ester characteristics. So if you are going for yeast ester characteristics over pitching and oxygenating tend to make a “cleaner” beer which might be underwhelming if you’ve chosen your yeast for it’s taste factor.
There are some yeasts that I have better luck harvesting off of a starter (for example London Ale III) but most of the yeasts I just harvest off of the primary fermentation will no ill effects. Yeast blends I never make a starter and rarely bother to harvest (for example Roselare blend or Hornindal Kveik)
Me do the shake and stir method. When i am of few days and home walk past it. And shake. Only time i use stirplate. When i have to work. Turn it on and leave it be. But dme. Every info i read. When making a starter you have to boil. Dme for 10 min than cool in ice bath but most the time now same here use a smack pack liqued yeast
Have you tried not boiling your DME for your starter? Try it sometime. One only has to reach 161F (72C) for 15 seconds for the starter to be pasteurized, , Since the DME was already fully boiled once when it was made there’s no additional benefit to boiling it a second time. Saves a lot of time and effort as well
For liquid yeasts I’ve been upping my preboil target volume by about 1/2 gallon. Boil for 10 mins then pull off 1200 ML or so of wort into my flask, chill, pitch, then toss on my stir plate while I finish up my brew day. Typically by the time I have it on the stirplate, I’m nearly at my target preboil volume. Then I pitch and aerate before I go to bed. This is usually about 6-8 hours on the stirplate set at it’s lowest speed.
Rad
So my “starter” method is…
bring one quart water up to a boil with the lid on… remove from the heat… add my 3/4 cup of DME… recover and walk away… I’ll check from time to time as it cools… All lumps melt… When its room temp… into my sanitized starter jug… Rack the starter, add the yeast… cover and shake! Think this was very similar to Flars method…
Usually doing this the day before brewing… Seems to work just fine for me…
I used this method also away back when I was a yeast rancher… use half for brewing and saved the other half for later…
Sneezles61
chaining brews is totally legit, and don’t even worry about making it a 1-gallon batch.
The rule-of-thumb is that you chain brews from lower-to-higher gravity, lower-to-higher hops, and lighter to darker styles.
So I would do a nice, quaffable pillsner or patersbier, and harvest that yeast into my next IPA/DIPA or Trippel or Stout. For most liquid yeast you can brew a full 5-gal batch without an additional starter for OG < 1.050. (I’m personally a fan of 3-gallon)
It’s also a great way to play with different expressions of the same yeast. a while back I did a light SMASH with pilsner and Citra using one of the Belgian strains. (forget the specific one) kept the temperature low throughout, and it produced a light fruity beer, almost a shandy really. Then pitched that same yeast into a triple and let the temps go a little crazy. That one got coriander and clove and pepper, which were all completely absent in the original. Have fun.
All ways i boil my dme and cool it down after 10 min
