Yeast Harvesting Q: Sugar water???

I picked up a 6-pack of Bell's 25th Anniversary Ale and I'm interesting in harvesting the yeast from a couple of these guys just for fun and experimentation.

It says directly on the 6-pack to decant the beer off the yeast, which I've never seen before. It is an American strong ale though at around 8%, so I'm guessing it's a different yeast strain that they use for bottling. Oddly though, it is one of the lowest flocculating yeasts I have ever seen in a bottle. The bottles have been in the fridge over a week and the yeast has barely settled on the bottom, and some is stuck in suspension just above the bottom.


Anyway! my question is this. I don't have any DME or other such goodness, and I have a bottle of juice which I don't know if it has unwanted preservatives or not (there's no sorbates, at least). Would I be able to just mix up some sugar water and use that as a starter for the yeast?

Technically yes ,would i recomend it no! If your not near a LHBS ive heard of people using Malta Goya ,which is like a malt soda to make a starter. Some grocery stores have it in the goya food section i think u have to decarb it by boiling it for a few minuets.

If its worth doing, you may as well do it right. Buy some DME and make a starter.

it's really more of an experiment than anything. the beer was decent, but nothing special. I'm just trying my hand at culturing yeast. if it were a beer/yeast I were truly interested in, I would definitely make a run to the LHBS for some DME.

I'm just curious if it's possible. I wasn't sure if sugar alone was food enough for yeast.

Sugar will work fine for what you're doing.

Sugar is fine if you are doing a science project. But if you are planning on using this yeast to ferment beer, you should not use table sugar. I've read that using table sugar to build yeast will cause it to quickly lose its ability to convert maltose (malt sugars) properly..thereby ruining it.

This is a bad idea because the yeast will become accustomed to consuming the simple sugars in table sugar and when it's time to eat up all those beer sugars (maltose, etc.) they will not take to the idea very well and may drop out of the fermentation before the job is done.
http://www.brew365.com/technique_making_a_yeast_starter.php

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you could pour it into jars of chilled boiled water for storage and make the starter when you're getting ready to use them
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f163/yeast-washing-illustrated-41768/

dcp27 said:

you could pour it into jars of chilled boiled water for storage and make the starter when you're getting ready to use them
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f163/yeast-washing-illustrated-41768/

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Pour what?

the dregs from the bottles. they dont immediately need to go into a starter