yeast

The last of the Jack-O-Lanterns have been carved, lit, admired, left out to go soft, and been discarded like so many before. Halloween costumes go back in the box, the box goes back in the attic, and our minds turn to the cozier side of Autumn - baked goods, sweaters, hot cocoa, and best of all...

When you make beer, you may think you're the boss of your ingredients. But have you stopped to think about how seemingly innocent Yeast may have the upper hand over humans, at least when it comes to world domination (are you paying attention, gamers)? To investigate Yeast's grand strategy for...

In my previous article Wort Canning To Save Time, one commenter questioned where the time savings were. Well, ask and ye shall receive! In this article, I'll show you how I use pre-canned starter wort to make preparing a yeast starter an extremely quick process. As I mentioned in the previous...

1. How did you start brewing? I've been a beer "nerd" and owned a kegerator for many years before I started brewing. I remember one night looking up the reviews on a beer I had purchased at my local bottle store and stumbled across a recipe for this beer on line. It was like a light when off in...

I have been brewing on my Recirculating Infusion Mashing System (RIMS) for a little over a year now, and am loving every minute of it. When I first started all-grain brewing, I could never quite get my mash temperatures right. It would always be too high or too low after adding the grains to the...

There are many benefits to making a yeast starter, and a plethora of threads on this forum discussing their merits and the techniques used to make them. It was through my involvement in one such thread I discovered that some people consider making a starter in an Erlenmeyer to be potentially...

How to Design a Homebrew Recipe So, you've brewed a kit or two, and it came out pretty well. Or perhaps you've followed a few recipes from books or websites, and have been pretty happy with the results. Now, though, you are ready to create a beer that is your very own. But where do you start...

Yeast can be the difference between a good recipe and a great recipe. I have been making cider, wine and mead for over a year now and I am learning quite a bit about the strains out there and what they can bring to the table. While experimenting with the prominent strains found at my local home...

Simple Yeast Storage Procedure Sanitize or sterilize jars. (Mason jars work nicely for this purpose. A quart size jar which will hold about 300 billion cells) Leave behind about an inch of beer when racking the beer off the yeast cake. Swirl the fermentor to suspend the yeast. (Avoid...

A typical Saturday brewday for me begins on Monday before sitting down to eat dinner. After picking up the liquid yeast vials needed for my recipe I boil up a batch of yeast starter wort made from extra light dried malt extract and filtered water. My LHBS The Brewers Apprentice stocks Munton's...

I remember as a new brewer it took me quite a while before I understood exactly what was going on inside the fermentor while I anxiously waited for my latest batch of beer to be ready for bottling. Eventually I did learn that a lot of the flavors that develop in a batch of beer are contributed...

A vast array of information is available to brewers today driven by the joy brewers have in sharing their experience. To avoid drowning in this sea of information, it's common to latch onto ideas that are easily within reach. All too often, what we grab onto is misconception instead of fact...

Sometimes I actively plan out homebrewing experiments. There will be some aspect of the hobby that I'd like to figure out and I will take the time to design a test with the intent of learning something. Then, there are times where an opportunity for an experiment comes up due to a mistake on...

After using a couple of different liquid yeasts for the first time, I decided that since they cost $6.50 a pop, that it'd be the most economical to wash the yeasts for re-use. And being retired, I can't afford to spend a whole lot on the needed equipment to do so. Enter Giant Eagle and BP. They...

I've seen several articles on this site about the proper way to slant yeast but haven't found one that shows the process of streaking yeast onto a plate and selecting individual colonies. This is the method I use. It's not flawless and it certainly has room for improvement but it's cheap and...

Freezing Starter-Sized Samples of Yeast for Long-Term Storage Written by Brewitt with contributions from HBT members WHAT: The purpose of this article is to summarize what has been learned about freezing yeast by a number of contributors to the thread "Do you know how to make a yeast starter...

I began washing and harvesting my own yeast about a year ago. I got excited and harvested 4 jars from 4 batches in the first month, leaving me with 16 jars of 4 different yeasts. Since I usually brew twice per month, I had a ton of yeast just sitting in my fridge. After using some of this stored...

In the simplest of terms, beer fermentation consists of yeast converting simple sugars into alcohol. There are versions of this process happening all over the world, to all sorts of sugars, by innumerable strains of yeast. What this means for you, is that your local homebrew shop isn't the only...

Yeast rinsing has been covered countless times inpodcasts, YouTube videos, and a number of websites. I have been rinsing yeast with very good success for several years. I seem to follow the same practices as shown in all of the above outlets. Over the last year, I have started to switch out my...

Sometimes I actively plan out homebrewing experiments. There will be some aspect of the hobby that I'd like to figure out and I will take the time to design a test with the intent of learning something. Then, there are times where an opportunity for an experiment comes up due to a mistake on...