Homemade Natural Yeast Nutrient Recipe

Where I am located I cannot run down to the LHBS for supplies. There is only one brewing store in the country and the stock there is pretty thin. It's a beer focused shop so anything wine specific or outside the bare basics of even beer making they don't have it. Honestly I'm grateful we have even that because ordering stuff in from out of the country is a PITA and shipping costs are crazy high.

There are a lot of things I'm having to look into making on my own or doing without. On top of that I prefer to go natural as much as possible too. That is where this project comes from.

One of the things I'm sure I'm going to need is yeast nutrient, since I'm wanting to focus on meads and fruit wines, and I have seen a lot of different advice on alternatives to the prepared packages. I have studied up on as many of those recommendations as I could dig up and and I have come up with a recipe that I believe will work well, but I'd like to toss it out to the community for review.

Once I have my theoretical recipe finalized I'll cook some up and use it and report back how it went. I'm leaning towards cooking up a large batch all at once and using a little at a time for consistency and ease of use.

If you think there is something that should be added or removed or the proportions changed please be as detailed as you can in your feedback.

Or if you have your own recipe you use feel free to share it. My goal is to build a recipe others can easily find and use and not have to dig around and guess at it like I have been doing.

Homemade Natural Yeast Nutrient Recipe (Version 0.01beta Untested)

2 liters water
1 cup whole wheat, cracked or rolled
1 cup whole oats cracked, or rolled
1 cup whole barley cracked, or rolled
1 cup raisins diced or smashed
1 cup banana diced with peel on
1 cup diced tomatoes, fresh or canned
1 tea bag

Combine water, wheat, oats, barley, raisins, bananas and tomatos
Simmer together 30 minutes.
Remove from heat
Add teabag.
Let cool about hour.
Filter liquid through a screen strainer or cloth and save the liquid.
Keep refrigerated.

Use in doses of about 1/4 cup per 20 liters every several days during primary fermentation.

Try boiling a packet of bakers yeast and adding that. Yeast will feed off of dead yeast cells, which conveniently contain just about everything yeast need to grow and reproduce.

I see the inherent logic in that approach but I have two thoughts that make me question it's efficacy.

First, there aren't that many yeasts in a packet, so there does not seem like that would be a really significant amount of nutrient.

Second, As an organism metabolizes vitamins and mineral compounds many of those compounds are transformed into metabolites of the original compound and are no longer really useful as nutrients.

I have seen several people recommend adding the food supplement commonly called brewers yeast as a yeast nutrient but from what I could see from it's nutritional analysis there was not really anything that was not already present in the ingredients I already have.

I'm not dismissing the idea of adding yeast as an ingredient, I'm just asking what is missing that the yeast would bring?

My understanding is that dead yeast provides the trace amounts of zinc and other minerals needed for proper yeast nutrition. I imagine it should still be beneficial to add an additional nitrogen source, as that seems to be the main limitation on growth.

Riot said:

My understanding is that dead yeast provides the trace amounts of zinc and other minerals needed for proper yeast nutrition. I imagine it should still be beneficial to add an additional nitrogen source, as that seems to be the main limitation on growth.

Click to expand...

From my further research it seems that nitrogen may be the most important thing that the dead cooked yeasts provide.

So yeast or some other nitrogen rich food is going to be in the next version of the recipe

I'd love to know an update and whether this recipe worked well or not. With or without the boiled baker's yeast?