Best yeast starter kit?

[Anthony_Lopez]

I've seen the kit from morebeer that includes the alchohol lamp, slants, etc, however I haven't seen too many other sites that have a good kit. Did you guys put your kits together piece by piece or go for a kit?

Thanks!

 

[PintOfBitter]

I tried doing a bulk buy and selling off the excess in the form of complete kits. I made a small profit but it took a while to get rid of the kits.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f11/yeast-banking-kits-54884/

I ordered the stuff from cynmar. they had some pretty good prices.

 

[fratermus]

Part by part, off basicsciencesupplies.com and others.

 

[flyangler18]

I've assembled my equipment piece by piece, mostly through Cynmar and BasicScienceSupplies.

Kaiser has a complete parts list (Cynmar) on his website here.

 

[Bokonon]

I picked up the pieces I needed from cynmar, but I forgot to order an alcohol burner at the same time. One of these days I'll find something else I need and order one, I hate to pay the shipping for just one item.

In the meantime I just use a bic lighter to flame tools. Not the most convenient, but its worked fine for me

 

[Anthony_Lopez]

I took a look at that list on the wiki. Just curious, but why would we need petri dishes as home brewers?

 

[flyangler18]

but why would we need petri dishes as home brewers?

By streaking plates, you can harvest single colonies of yeast from a pure culture using a noc loop to grow up to sequentially from 10 ml to 100 ml to 1000mL.

Easy to store with a very small footprint.

 

[rsmith179]

Fly... It sounds like you have done this a few times. Are you by any chance canning your wort? How are you getting exactly those quantities of 10, 100, and 1000ml. Brewing small starters each time?

 

[flyangler18]

Fly... It sounds like you have done this a few times. Are you by any chance canning your wort? How are you getting exactly those quantities of 10, 100, and 1000ml. Brewing small starters each time?

Actually, I'm only freezing right now but I've done plenty of reading on the subject. I tend to get a bit obsessive with new techniques and jump in with both feet. Kaiser's Wiki is where I gleaned most of my information.

 

[rsmith179]

Sounds good. Thanks for the heads up about Kaiser's wiki. I'll be checking that out. I've been washing my yeast for quite a while, but I have a mini-fridge full of yeast right now and would love to have slants in there instead.

 

[fratermus]

I took a look at that list on the wiki. Just curious, but why would we need petri dishes as home brewers?

To build on Fly's answer: the plate is often used as a way to propagate new-to-you yeasts or to reculture existing ones.

For example, you do a yeast trade with someone on HBT. You get the vial or plate in the mail and use it to streak your own plate. It verifies the culture made the trip through USPS and, as Fly noted, will allow you to pick up a single culture off the plate. If you're interested in teh details google "quadrant streak" . It's actually a neat idea and is, as a programmer might say, an elegant solution.

Many folks store their cultures on plates. I find it easier to use plates as an intermediate step on the way to slants or water suspensions. I run into problems with managing the humidity on plates, and the surface area is so large (and my house is so dusty) that I find plates pick up contaminants easier. I work around this by making and inoculating multiple plates any time I am working with them. In theory one should be able to harvest a culture from a plate with a contaminant way over there but I just use a different uncontaminated plate.