I’m getting ready to brew my Hawaiian Moose Tropical IPA this weekend, and last night got my yeast starter going for the Wyeast 1056 ale yeast used in that beer. I thought I’d jot down my reasoning and process for yeast and yeast starters.
Four essentials to brewing great beer are:
- Clean Equipment
- Proper sanitization
- Pitching the right amount of healthy yeast
- Fermentation temperature control
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So let’s look at pitching the right amount of healthy yeast.
There are a variety of yeast strains, which come in both a dry and a liquid form. Seven years ago when I started on this hobby, the homebrew extract kits I bought with came with a packet of unidentified dry yeast. There were liquid yeasts for homebrewers was available from Wyeast and White Labs, and dry yeast was came from Lallemand, Fermentis and Danstar. There are now a plethora of yeast suppliers, giving the homebrewer more strain choices for both dry and liquid forms.
Liquid yeast is my preferred form. Up until recently, liquid yeast was available in packages of 100 billion cells, but now some suppliers provide 200 billion cell packages. Dry yeast tends to come in packages of 11 grams, which supposedly has 20 billion cells per gram, or 220 grams for a typical package.
The typical rules for yeast pitch rates is to pitch 0.75 million cells of viable yeast an ale (1.5 million cells for a lager) for every milliliter of wort for every degree Plato. There are 3785 milliliters in a gallon. There are just under 19,000 milliliters in 5 gallons. A degree Plato is roughly 1.004 of original gravity. Divide the original gravity by 4 to get Plato (e.g., 1.050 is 12.5 degrees Plato). If you have 5 gallons of 1.050 wort, you need about 180 billion cells. For a quick rough estimate, you need 4 billion cells for each point of original gravity when pitching into a little over 5 gallons of wort. Double that for a lager.
For a liquid yeast pack has 100 billion cells, one package isn’t enough to have a proper yeast pitch rate for five gallons of a 1.040 beer. Complicating this is the fact that liquid yeast degrades over time, losing approximately 20% of its viable cells each month. So if your yeast is a month old, you probably have 80 billion cells instead of one hundred billion.
What about dry yeast? It is actually cheaper, has a longer shelf life, and contains almost double the cells of a typical liquid yeast pack. When I started homebrewing, there weren’t as many dry yeast choices, and there were questions about the final product produced by dry yeast. Now, however, it appears that technology has greatly improved the quality of dry yeast, and there are many more choices of yeast strains. I use the Safale US-05 dry yeast when making my annual Revenge of Boris Imperial Stout, as it requires over 700 billion cells of yeast for my ten gallon batch. This beer placed third in the St. Louis region of the National Homebrew Competition in 2017, so dry yeast can certainly make quality beer.
However, I mostly use liquid yeast, probably out of habit as much as anything. There are still many more strains available in liquid form than dry, but I use liquid yeast even for the standby California ale strain.
Getting the right amount to pitch
So if a five gallon batch requires 200 billion cells of yeast, and you have a single two month old package of liquid yeast, you need to make a starter to increase the number of cells. A yeast starter is how this is done, and is is simply a small amount of unhopped wort (usually one to two liters) at 1.040 gravity. The yeast does its work by splitting into multiple cells. By using a starter, you can grow that original 70 billion cells into the 200 billion necessary in a couple of days. Besides that, you assure that you have viable, healthy yeast cells to pitch in your wort. For details on starter, Jamil Zainascheff has a couple of great write ups at his Mr. Malty website.
To determine what size starter is needed, I use a spreadsheet downloaded from Homebrew Dad . There is also many such calculators available on line (including one at Mr. Malty ), but I prefer the downloadable spreadsheet from Homebrew Dad for a specific reason. It allows me to “overbuild” a starter, essentially giving me “free” yeast for the next brew from the same package.
Now, commercial breweries typically take the yeast from one brew and pitch it into the next. Homebrewers can do this as well, and in fact I used to do this. However, unless you have a conical fermentor with the ability to dump the pure yeast out of the bottom, it’s a bit painstaking to harvest the yeast. If you use a bucket or a carboy to ferment, you can leave a little beer in the bottom, swirl it so the yeast cake flows, and simply dump the yeast cake it into a jar or jars. This has the advantage of having the yeast stored under fermented beer (which is supposed to be the easiest on the yeast). It has the disadvantage of picking up the trub, dead yeast, and hop oils, which will then go into your next beer.
There is a method to “rinse” the yeast and remove a lot of the undesirable material, which is what I did. (Note: some folks call this method “yeast washing”, but there is a commercial practice called washing which uses acids to kill bacteria and truly “wash” undesirable things from the yeast). Yeast rinsing involves having preboiled, cool water, and having jars to let yeast separate and settle. The details of this practice can be found here . You can get a lot of yeast through this practice. I found, however, that with the yeast having been pitched into a full batch and with multiple transfers, the odds of picking up an infection are greater.
The Homebrew Dad calculator allows you to oversize the amount of yeast grown by a set amount, and then tells you how to split the starter between the amount to pitch and the amount to store. By overbuilding by 100 billion cells, you get the equivalent of a new pack of yeast to have on hand for the next brew. By using the starter, the yeast is being grown in an ideal environment, without hops, and is stored in the fermented starter wort. I’ve used this with great success, which is probably the real reason I continue to use liquid yeast.
Making a starter is pretty easy, the Mr. Malty and the Homebrew Dad links above have instructions. My ideal method is to use a pressure cooker, mix up some dry malt extract (DME) and yeast nutrient and can up a bunch of yeast starters. That allows me to simply pull a jar or two of wort, put it in a sanitized borosilicate flask (I have a 5 liter flask that gets the most use), add a sanitized magnetic stir bar, and put in on my home made a stir plate.
Here’s my method for canning wort for starter. I mainly use quart jars, although I have done pint jars as well. For a 1.040 beer, a 1 liter starter on a stir plate will produce enough cells to pitch for a 5 gallon batch with 100 billion cells left over. I often make ten gallon batches, and higher gravity than 1.040. I find that in those cases, I need two liter starters. I can get two liters in one quart jar (neat trick, huh?) by making the gravity of the starter wort being canned higher. I then add filtered water, and end up with 2 liters of 1.040 starter wort from one quart of canned wort. I’ve measured out how much wort actually gets into a quart jar. By leaving a typical one inch room of head space in a quart jar, I need to add 1.075 liters to make the amount a full 2 liters. In order to get to 1.040 after that dilution, the wort in the jar needs to be at 1.086 specific gravity. To make 7 quarts of 1.086 starter wort, I need 3.34 lbs of DME (1516 grams) in 4.95 liters of water (my Presto 16 quart pressure canner holds 7 quart jars).
If a pint jar is being used, it needs 600 ml of water added to make 1 liter of wort. The starter wort in the pint jar needs to have 1.100 specific gravity wort to dilute to 1.040 (there is differing amounts of head space in the two sizes of jars which accounts for the lesser quantity).
Drew Beechum (only caveat – I would opt for 20 minutes of processing time) and The Mad Fermentationist both have good writeups of the canning process, complete with the appropriate warnings. Summarizing, when canning wort, use 15 lbs of pressure for 20 minutes to sterilize the wort. You can simply mix the DME and yeast nutrient with the water in the jars. However, I’ve done this and didn’t like the result. DME loves to foam up and boil over until the hot break occurs. When canning, this happens in the jar, and I ended up with a bunch of DME stuck to the lid, and less liquid in the jar. It is worth the effort to bring the starter wort to a boil in a separate pot so the hot break can take place, then transfer to the canning jars.
If I don’t have any canned wort (like last night!), then I use DME and yeast nutrient, boil the amount needed, cool it, put it in the flask. You can actually boil the starter wort in the flask, but I find this is an easy way to have a boilover, and the flask seems to take longer to cool than an aluminum or stainless steel pot. Boiling up a starter each time isn’t all that difficult, and it does have the advantage of allowing you to pick an exact size.
So now my yeast has been pitched in the 3.8 liter starter in my five liter flask, merrily working away atop the stir plate. I generally leave it on the stir plate for 36 hours, then split it into the harvest amount for storage (which will hopefully be 200 billion cells) and the pitching amount. Having just come off the stir plate, the yeast will be uniformly mixed in the liquid. I let it sit for another day at room temperatures, the theory being that once out of food, the yeast will gently go into a kind of hibernation stage. I then refrigerate it (typically the night before my brew day). The cold causes the yeast to drop to the bottom of the flask or jar. Once the brew is done and wort cooled, I remove the yeast from the refrigerator, decant off the liquid from the top, put some of the new wort in the flask or jar, swirl it around, and pitch it into the fermentor containing the wort.
And, if all goes well, in a couple of weeks I should have some very fresh IPA on tap!