Building a Yeast Bank

February 5, 2016August 25, 2017

Building a Yeast Bank

We like to make a variety of brews and with the cost of yeast, we have made starters for our brews for a while now. One of the added benefits of creating a starter for your yeast is that you save money since you do not have to purchase multiple packs of yeast for a brew. We brew ten gallons at a time, the yeast packs that are sold at your local homebrew store or that come with ingredient kits generally contain enough yeast for a five gallon batch.
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June 22, 2015August 25, 2017

Stir Plate for 5L Flask

One of the things I have started doing is overbuilding my starters. In doing this, I can harvest 100 billion yest cells from the starter itself. This process will be detailed in another blog post. The purpose of this post is to address the sheer size of the flask I have been using to accomplish this. Instead of using step starters, I use a 5L Erlenmeyer Flask.
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April 6, 2015August 25, 2017

Dual Stir Plate

I had a double brew day coming up and needed a way to do two yeast starters at the same time. I didn’t want to build another single stir plate, I knew we would be doing high gravity beers and if we wanted to get a partigyle batch off it, then we would need 2 starters going.

I also wanted to make this one look a bit better, too. Here is the equipment list I put together:
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March 16, 2015August 25, 2017

Building a Stir Plate

Since we are graduating to 10 Gallon All Grain batches, we need to create yeast starters. Otherwise the cost of yeast is crazy. By creating a starter, we only need to purchase one package of yeast for most brews, instead of 2 or more. To create a starter most efficiently, you need a stir plate. This will stir the yeast, oxygenating it and propagating yeast growth. A constant stir also knocks the carbon dioxide out of suspension. Carbon dioxide is a by-product of yeast growth and also inhibits yeast growth.
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