Yeast immobilization: magic beans of fermentation

[weirdboy]

If star san does anything to a yeast slurry, I'd think it lowers the p.H., not raise it.

 

[passedpawn]

If star san does anything to a yeast slurry, I'd think it lowers the p.H., not raise it.

Depends on the point of view. The if you're a yeast cell, your pH will go down. If you're a starsan thingy, your pH will go up.

 

[Terek]

How do you know the yeast isn't dying?

Because it ferments my beer like a brand new pack every time.....

 

[Terek]

I'd wager that once your star san hits the yeast slurry, the P.H. instantly goes too high and your star san is basically cloudy water with no killing ability. Next time, put your slurry into jars and settle it out. Decant the liquid and pitch a tbs full of slurry into a mason jar full of properly mixed star san and see what happens to your yeast...

Star san has to kill yeast or else you'd never be able to make a batch of beer with a low attenuating strain of yeast with the same gear you used to make a batch with a high attenuating yeast strain. If the star san didn't kill the high attenuating strain, it would always end up fermenting your wort to its attenuation level. You'd also never be able to make a beer with a neutral yeast after using a Belgian etc...

I guess that makes sense. All I care about is the jars are sanitized, and the wash water is sanitized. If it gets neutralized after hitting the slurry, dont matter to me. There will be no infection and thats what I care about. It started when I went to wash some slurry years ago, and forgot to boil water. I didnt have time to boil and cool, so I just said screw it. And used star san. It worked, so I continued to do it that way to this day.

BTW love the name. We would get along just fine

 

[MalFet]

this all is 100% false.

Hmm...what's 100% false? Nothing I've said was meant to suggest that washing your yeast with StarSan will kill it. In fact, acid washing is a fairly common thing in pro breweries.

 

[MalFet]

Star san has to kill yeast or else you'd never be able to make a batch of beer with a low attenuating strain of yeast with the same gear you used to make a batch with a high attenuating yeast strain. If the star san didn't kill the high attenuating strain, it would always end up fermenting your wort to its attenuation level. You'd also never be able to make a beer with a neutral yeast after using a Belgian etc...

That's not necessarily true. Yeast growth is exponential, but the dynamics of that growth are shaped by environmental factors. The most important of these factors is the density of available food. If food is abundant, you'll get the kind of explosive reproduction we all see with a good pitch. When the food starts to dwindle (but before it's actually gone), the yeast will drastically cut back on metabolic activity and wait for new opportunities to feed and breed. Yeast populations have evolved to be very strategic about how far they'll attenuate our wort, and they will drop into a low energy state well before it is metabolically necessary for a number of different potential reasons.

If your neutral yeast is pitched in proper quantities, it will eat the vast bulk of the food before the trace Belgian colonies go through enough reproduction cycles to be a meaningful presence. They're almost certainly still there, though. So are acetobacter, lactobacillus, and pediococcus, all of which are ubiquitous in the environment. StarSan can't kill everything, but so long as competing populations are small enough that's perfectly fine. In the absence of true sterilization techniques, all beer is infected; properly prepared beer, however, will spoil only very, very slowly.

 

[masonsjax]

Starsan works as a sanitizer because of it's low pH, which kills yeast when they in very small numbers. If you're adding it to an equal amount of slurry (give or take), the pH of the overal mixture will balance out and most of the yeast will survive. As mentioned, acid washing is common in a lab environment. For us homebrewers there is no reason to move yeast from the beer into water, Starsan, or any other liquid (unless freezing or slanting, etc.). Yeast is perfectly happy living under the beer that they fine tuned to their liking. Why transplant them to a new environment completely devoid of nutrients and with who knows what pH? Trub is actually beneficial to yeast colony health and future generations will be happy you left some in there. I'm not sure why trub has been so demonized by homebrewers. Anyway, this has all been debated ad nauseum on other threads.

I am very intrigued by the idea of immobilized yeast for our purposes and look forward to further discussion.

 

[blizz81]

Just read this entire thread for the first time and am happy at the ideas that have come from it. I wish someone had done a series of very detailed experiments re: the ideas of immobilizing bugs by this point so I could be reasonably confident in trying that As is, I might give this a shot for my next hoppy beer.

 

[blizz81]

Gave this a shot in a little shy of 6gals of 1.077 DIPA (with plans of adding some turbinado during ferment). Scaled the OP's batch size up 2x and created two batches (total = 4 packs of S-05). Figure it's still underpitching, but given the nature of the immobilized yeast, thinking that may just make for a long ferment more than anything else in this case.

Was hard with the syringes I bought to drop in a consistent, small ball, and with the amount of solution we were dealing with, it took a while and we got impatient at times. But still fun and we'll see what happens. It was outgassing within 10 minutes of pitching and has been outgassing at a consistent if not slow-ish rate. No real krausen, the bubbles you see in the pic below were at about 24hrs.

 

[agrazela]

So glad to see this topic brought back to life.

So here's a thought (and maybe it was brought up but I missed it): if this immobilization technique greatly reduces ester formation, then does fermentation temperature control become far less critical? From what I've seen the immobilized yeast balls worked slower in side-by-side tests vs. normally pitched yeast at typical fermentation temperature...but what if you could run the yeast ball fermentation at ambient temperature--or even warmed, maybe even 90+°F?--and still get a clean flavor profile? I imagine it would HAVE to run faster at elevated temp?

 

[blizz81]

So here's a thought (and maybe it was brought up but I missed it): if this immobilization technique greatly reduces ester formation, then does fermentation temperature control become far less critical? From what I've seen the immobilized yeast balls worked slower in side-by-side tests vs. normally pitched yeast at typical fermentation temperature...but what if you could run the yeast ball fermentation at ambient temperature--or even warmed, maybe even 90+°F?--and still get a clean flavor profile? I imagine it would HAVE to run faster at elevated temp?

I would think one plus down this line would be that you could ferment a beer in natural temperatures / without a fermentation chamber with less negative effect. This would be limiting in terms of style, but could benefit brewers moving into smaller spaces, etc.

I think it would take some exBeeriments to try to see how ester production would be affected.


Now that I've taken a stab at the process, I do need to go back and read the thread again. I forget how many questions were asked and speculated upon / answered. I will be bottling vs. kegging, and I'll be dry-hopping, so I imagine I'll have to rack off, dry hop, and somehow either maintain some yeast balls or make another batch for bottling and drop a few in each bottle.

 

[beardown2489]

WOW. this thread is crazy.

Subscribed!

 

[blizz81]

I'm prepared to call my exbeeriment a relative failure.


Started picking up in activity some on Wednesday (brewday was Saturday). Even moreso on Thursday until I came home and it had reached the point it is still at now, pictured below. There's a fair amount of normal convective fermentation action now pushing sediment up and down through the beer. I guess it would seem over time, enough yeast escaped the blobs and I've more or less got a normal fermentation going.


By Wednesday, the yeast blobs did appear...a bit saturated? Might be nothing, but they looked a bit more sloshy to me. I think some have fallen down, hard to see the bottom of the carboy in my ferm freezer. By this morning a few smaller guys had made their escape out the blowoff tube. Here's hoping it doesn't blow!

 

[nacho2100]

I am surprised I never posted on this thread as this technique is exactly how industry city distillery does their fermentation (basically a bioreactor with inline pumps)

Additionally, I would love to see how the IPA came out and if there were any clarity issues.

I will have to try the chitosan approach one of these days.

 

[blizz81]

Additionally, I would love to see how the IPA came out and if there were any clarity issues.

If this was in regards to my IPA in the last few posts, it did turn out well, but I'd say the immobilization part was nil. A large amount of yeast escaped the beans - I had a large yeast cake on the bottom by the end. I'm guessing something was off in my measurements when making the solutions. You could see a number of the beans "torn" open by the end, even.


So it ended up just a "normal" beer, I guess. Clarity is good after cold-crashing in the bottle for a couple weeks, as with most of our beers.

 

[BeerGrylls]

We appreciate the update blizz81!

 

[Miraculix]

Bump for curiosity

 

[AmarikinBrew]

Bump for curiosity

I want to know if anybody has used the beans in place of slanting yeast.