yeast management

Starting your own lab at home can be rewarding and fun. Not only does it provide a more in-depth understanding of how yeast and other microorganisms function, but it can be fun at the same time. Now if being extremely sanitary and always on the alert for risk of contamination isn’t your thing...

So why would a homebrewer ever think of getting a microscope? Isn’t it just one more unnecessary expensive gadget? Isn’t it just for the ultra-geeks? Don’t you need to be a microbiologist to know how to use one? The short answer to the last 3 questions is: no. For the long answer to the first...

Advantages of Using Dry Yeast Dry yeast has a lot of advantages over liquid yeast. It is cheap and readily available. If stored cool and dry, after 2 years the cells still have a viability over 90%. The form factor is small and one packet contains around 230 Billion cells. That is more than...

My understanding is that the reason the wort used in slants should be boiled in a pressure cooker under 15PSI of pressure is to raise the temperature high enough to kill botulinum spores. I've only made a couple of batches of slats so far and as I don't have a pressure cooker I've just boiled...

I have a small collection of yeast cultures that I keep on slants. Some of them are getting on for 6 months old and I'd like to restreak them onto fresh slants to keep the strain going. Is it fine to just transfer and streak directly from the old slant onto a new one? Will the viability of...