Big Ol' Starter

I'm getting ready to brew my first "big" beer. With an original gravity of 1070, the pitching rate should be around 200 billion yeast cells. The Wyeast activator smack packs give you about 100 billion, so in order to grow that I made a starter on Friday evening.

A starter is just a small batch of beer really. It gives the yeast something to eat so they can go forth and multiply. I made this starter with some old (very old) dry malt extract that came with all the brewing gear my dad gave to me.

I usually use an OJ starter just to wake up the yeast and double check their viability. This is important when I'm reusing washed/harvested yeast because I want to make sure everything is OK before I dump it into five gallons of wort. For this beer however, I need to double the number of yeast cells and the predominant school of thought says that when doing that, you want your starter to closely resemble the wort into which it will end up. It should be ready to pitch in a day or so.

I had to tape the stopper in the bottle to keep it from popping out - I guess it is a little too big. Classy looking, no?

Batch #2 Kegged and a Yeast Wash

We kegged batch #2 Thursday night, a couple of days early but this time we know not to touch it for a while. We had a sample on its way into the keg - tasted good!

We also did our first yeast wash. I used a good yeast strain in this batch (Wyeast American Ale - 1056) so we recovered enough for 4 more batches. It is still mixed up with water in the picture, but the yeast should settle to the bottom.

I'm going to use one of them on the next batch this weekend, but I will definately use a starter - perhaps Tyler's OJ starter - to make sure I didn't screw anything up washing or storing the yeast. If the starter does fail, I can pitch the dry packet that came with the kit.

You can see the keg force-carbing in the picture as well - yum!