Preparations

posted by Jon

The ingredients for batch #1 arrived on Friday:

Clockwise from top right we have liquid malt extract (plastic jugs), hop pellets, grains for steeping and dry malt extract (plastic bag hiding under grains).

The plan is to brew our IPA this coming Wednesday. One of the most helpful steps in brewing a tasty beer is using a yeast starter. I will run you all through the process of why and how this is done.

First, the "why".

The step in the brewing process that is probably the most important is the step that hardly anything is done to the beer. It is the period of time between when the beer is taken off the stove and when the yeast is "pitched". When this cooling process starts, the wort (beer before the yeast is added) is usually over 150 degrees. Yeast is a picky little guy that works best about 70 degrees and will be killed if the temperature gets too high. Yeast is usually pitched in a beer at 75 to 80 degrees. While the wort is cooling it is quite susceptible to other things (bacteria and such) floating around in the air that are looking for a nice warm spot to land where they can eat and reproduce. The longer a wort takes to cool, the more time these bad guys have to jump into the wort and start reproducing. Because of this you want to cool the wort as quickly as possible.

The yeast starter brings the big guns. By the time you pitch your yeast, some stuff has already more than likely landed in the wort. If you've got 5 gallons of wort, that's enough food for bad strains to coexist with the good yeast for a while. The longer the bad stuff has, the worse your beer is going to taste. Enter: Yeast Starter. A yeast starter is essentially a small batch of beer, between 1 pint and 2 quarts. When the yeast is added to the starter it has a chance to reproduce like crazy without competition. After 48 hours or so, the amount of yeast in your starter has increased exponentially. Once the wort is cooled and a few of our bad strains of junk has had a chance to get in there, instead of adding a little bit of yeast, we have a whole army of yeast, ready to devour any sugars and reproduce even more. Our bad little beasties never had a chance.

Now, the "how".

The first thing we do is make our little batch of beer. I'm using 1 quart of water and 1 cup of dry malt extract (DME). The DME is the fermentable sugar that the yeast is going to eat and turn into alcohol.

We let the starter boil for 10 minutes and then let it cool. I put the sauce pan in an ice water bath to cool it off as quickly as possible. Once it has cooled to 70/80 degrees I pour it into a growler and shake it vigorously (yeast likes oxygen).

The yeast we are using is yeast that was harvested from another batch of beer. It has been in a canning jar sitting in my fridge for a couple of months. I took it out earlier to get it to room temperature. The yeast is poured into the growler and our starter is done.

By Wednesday the airlock on top of the growler will be bubbling like crazy as the yeast starts to eat the sugars and release carbon dioxide.

Hope you enjoyed your lesson on yeast starters. Look for a new post on Thursday with a play by play of the brewing of our IPA.