Jim's Beer Kit

Concerned you added "dregs in the bottom of the mash vessel". If they weren't boiled first it's a possible route to infection. They were but I should have quoted them as "dregs after boiling" as it's a Grainfather system. They had cooled but I gave them another "boil" on a hob top to make sure. The...

I think it is to do with osmotic pressure. A BC beer's yeast is in a pretty poor state. The cell walls are not robust enough to act as a membrane that takes in nutrients efficiently and expels the stuff we want. The ability to tolerate normal function requires the cell walls to be rebuilt. The high...

This - and this weekend’s brewing - has me thinking about yeast growth phase and subsequent fermentation phase. How do they know? If I pitch a yeast quantity at the smaller end of the scale, received wisdom is that the yeast get multiplying until there’s enough of the buggers to ferment the wort. I...

Aiming for 1.019 so we'll see!

Thanks

Thanks all, interesting comments all contributing to the learning process. The starter was in the region 1.030-1.040, closer to the lower end I think once the amount sampled from the keg was added. I hit the numbers on the brew itself and having taken your comments on board, pitched 100% of the star...

Actually, my logic was to do with whether fermentation actually takes off initially rather than stalls later on.

So, are we saying that whether I pitch it all of save 25% to build up more, the number of cells that end up in the fermenter will be the same? Rightly or wrongly, I thought saving the 25% for a kind of second starter would build up the cells quicker/better in a smaller volume of wort than in the 23l...

Yep, thought the amount of yeast would be a potential issue. Hence, holding back 25% of it to try and build up more just in case the brew doesn't take off. I'll let you know how it goes.

Cheers

Evening chaps. On the topic of harvesting the yeast from the 5l mini-cask, I drew off most of the ale from a Broadside cask and ended up with 400ml which looked pretty clear. After 4 days of sitting the 400ml in 800ml water/125g DME, it seems to be foaming up reasonably. My (novice) question is that...

Just bought a couple of Broadside mini-cask. They seem to be cask conditioned by the look of the cask but I've not opened them yet.