Commercial brewery yeast confusion

[othevad]

yo.

So I've been assisting at a few commercial breweries in my area trying to get some more experience and learning lots o stuff.

At two separate breweries I watched the brewmaster pitch a large pack of dry yeast (basically a brick of dry yeast, biggest package I've ever seen *insert innuendo here*) into the fermenter after brewing a batch, when they were refreshing their yeast and not repitching from previous batches. I asked about pitching dry yeast and both guys said that it was all good, which went in complete contrary to my previous beliefs that I have learned through the years of homebrewing. I asked a little bit about it without trying to overstep my bounds as a newb but they both said, it provided enough cells to account for their brews. (7 and 10bbl systems)

Anyone care to comment about this? yeast on a commercial scale has been one of the points that has confused me, if a brewery doesn't have their own yeast lab and repitches from previous fermentations. How do they control the strain after a few batches? I kinda always figured they would have made a 20 gallon starter or something =P

comments?

 

[theveganbrewer]

Every brew is essentially a huge starter, isn't it? They'll control it based on slurry volume and are probably not nearly as accurate as one would expect from a commercial brewery.

 

[Hammy71]

I'm not sure what your asking. It sounds like they (and most breweries) re-use the yeast slurry from a previous brew. But, after several generations they will start anew. Pitching a huge block of dry yeast doesn't sound strange to me at all. Why would they need to make a starter with dry yeast? I don't, nor do I rehydrate. I'm not sure what other commercial breweries do, but I imagine the ones that do have their own labs, and save their strains, do make some sort of starter when they need to.

 

[isleofman]

I'm not sure what your asking. It sounds like they (and most breweries) re-use the yeast slurry from a previous brew. But, after several generations they will start anew. Pitching a huge block of dry yeast doesn't sound strange to me at all. Why would they need to make a starter with dry yeast? I don't, nor do I rehydrate. I'm not sure what other commercial breweries do, but I imagine the ones that do have their own labs, and save their strains, do make some sort of starter when they need to.

According to the Yeast book, not re-hydrating yeast before pitching kills about 50% of them.

othevad: I would suggest reading http://www.amazon.com/dp/0937381969/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20 It has insight on yeast at the home brew level, as well as the micro-brewery level.

 

[Hammy71]

And according to BYO that is bunk. Its been beat to death on here so no need to argue. To each his own.....