High malt glucose in starter?

Fingers · 11-09-2008, 01:33 AM

I was supposed to brew today but life happened. My starter, 4 cups DME to one cup water, fermented out a while ago. For a ten gallon batch that's a little light, but DME is stupid expensive where I am.

I was at the HBS and I bought some high malt glucose thinking I was buying LME. This stuff is pure white. It's been sitting around and I thought maybe I'd boil up some more water and add some of this stuff to my starter to perk it up for tomorrow and increase the cell count.

What do you guys think about that idea? I have 2.2 pounds of it which is about the size of a pint. I know it's a good idea to step your yeast up with malt extract to 'condition' it for what it's going to have to eat later, but I have done that. I'm wondering if putting sugar, if that is a good approximation to what this is, will affect the quality of the yeast population.

Fingers · 11-09-2008, 04:14 AM

Didn't seem to be much interest in this topic so I went with my gut. I heated up a large jar of water to sanitize, cooled it just a bit, and then stirred in enough cold glucose to get a gravity of 1.048. That was a little higher than what I'd wanted, but close enough.

Unfortunately despite my best intentions I didn't measure the quantities so I could share the information. I weighed my jar and set the tare, added some glucose and stirred. Once the glucose was dissolved I put my hydrometer in and it bottomed out. Without thinking, I added more water so it would float. It was low so I added more glucose. Oops. Didn't weigh the new additions. I thought, 'Fine. I know the container has 1kg (2.2 lbs) so I'll just weigh the container when I'm done.' Problem is that I didn't weigh it beforehand so I don't know how much the container itself weighs. I just gave up after that.

So I pitched the glucose and I notice that just now it's starting to bubble. That took about 15 minutes. This will bring my starter up to about 3/4 gallon for tomorrow. I expect it to be fully fermented in less than 24 hours because of the simple sugar but I won't decant unless it's finished and cleared.