Question about making a starter from bottle sediment

I'm planning on making a starter from a 6-Pack of Oberon. I've seen the youtube videos where people insist on flaming the bottle and then recapping till the yeast has warmed up. My question is this:

Can I just add the bottom cm of each bottle to a flask full of wort after I drink each bottle?

I'd be pouring the beer into a glass so I don't contaminate the bottle. I'm just wondering how careful I need to be and if it is important to add the remaining yeast all at once, or if one bottle at a time will be ok. Maybe dip the bottles in sanitizer before opening them?

Thanks!

Flame the bottle openings if you can, or at least wipe them down with StarSan or vodka.

Shouldn't they already be sanitary since they were under the cap? I was thinking about submerging the unopened bottles into sanitizer before opening them...

You just want to make sure that everything is sanitized properly. Keeping infections out of the yeast is more difficult when building a starter from a very small amount of yeast than from a liquid yeast package. Anything that gets into the yeast slurry you try to build will grow with the yeast and potentially ruin a beer, since you may not even notice the bug until it is in your wort.

Ed

Thanks for the reply, Ed.

So I'm going to use a 1L flask to make the starter, starting with the 100ml of water to 10g of DME ratio and then step it up to 1 L... can I put the original 100ml starter in my 1L flask and then just add more wort when the time comes?

Thanks!

You can put the entire 100ml into the 1L flask and then add wort, or you can cool the 100ml, decant and then pitch the slurry into the 1L flask with wort. Either way works just fine.

Ed

+1 on starting small

Think of it as pitching a really tiny batch, but instead of adjusting your amount of yeast to the wort, adjust the wort to the amount of yeast.

So how big will I want the starter to be before I pitch it into a OG of 1.056?

Google "yeast pitching calculator". You should find a site with all sorts of goodness concerning yeast propagation and pitching.

Also - be prepared to wait for any activity in your first 100ml. I have had some yeasts lag for up to 6 days when harvesting from bottles.

Are you sure the yeast in the bottle is the yeast used to ferment? A lot of breweries will filter their beer and add back a neutral yeast for that "bottle conditioned" look and taste. Just a thought.

It's a Bell's Beer (Kalamazoo Brewing Company) - they do use the same yeast for conditioning as for fermenting. I've heard that a lot of Belgian beers have special conditioning yeasts...