Yeast Culture Equip'

[Frothy]

http://www.hopandgrape.co.uk/admin/cata ... e=0&page=1

Pleasantly surprised to find somebody supplying some yeast culturing kit.
The innoculating loop for £8 I particuarly have my eye on. Its a tungsten loop which you clean/ sterelise by flashing it though a burning gas flame before using it to transfer your yeast on the Agar slants so that you can store it in the fridge.

I'll do a page on it sometime but basically its good for keeping the same yeast strain long term - when you buy it you can culture your yeast onto the slants and grow all sucessive starters etc from that slant (or further slants that you copy from it) meaning that your using exactly the same yeast for each batch.

The biggest benefit is that when the yeast is grown on agar solid media its easy to see if there is any contamination unlike when we store a jar of trub in our fridge or a vial of yeast in liquid.

Matt

[eskimobob]

It would be great if you could do a page on this, I have bought some of the vials from Hop and Grape and recently tried collecting and freezing yeast. I tried restarting one vial for my Turbo Cider and thought it was completely dead but 4 days later an the starter is just starting to work (mind you, the cider is nearly finished fermenting too as I used some bread yeast).

I basically have not got a clue about using the agar slanted wotnots but would be interested. A good article on it would be great

[Reg]

Interesting... I've been looking into this too as my next little project. Those plastic vials £20.00 per 1000, i.e 2p each without the stopper, (about 4 p with). That's if I can remember where I saw them.

If a few of us are going to have a go at this, we might as well all put in and trade up to a load of the little beggars.

[moorsd]

I'd be up for that Reg, had a look on the Hop & Grape site before and thought about looking in to it further!

The power of economies of scale!!

[Reg]

Well typically I can't find the site immediately but I've found a couple of others that are still quite resonable...

You can have 100 proper glass test tubes with proper caps http://www.teklab.co.uk/acatalog/GLASS- ... -CAPS.html

The same site does virgin polypropylene tubes and caps as well but not quite at the price I remember seeing.

[eskimobob]

Just read a couple of articles that are quite simple to follow and am keen to give this a go.

http://oz.craftbrewer.org/Library/Metho ... Hand.shtml

http://www.alsand.com/beer/yeast/index_E.html

I have six glass test tubes but need to get some petri dishes, a pippet and some agar stuff.

[Frothy]

Ok cool. I havent tried it at home yet but I've spent many hours doing exactly the same kind of thing with bacteria and fungi in the lab. Dissertations due in in a couple of weeks, I'll get the page down after that and make a good stab at it.

until then:
(in this first link the guy is using gelatin instead of agar - much cheaper)
http://www.homebrew.com/articles/article09090001.shtml
http://www.hbd.org/brewery/library/YstCult.html
http://liddil.com/beer/culture/culture.html <- Reg found this one

[Reg]

So... are we all gonna get on with this then? :huh:

(Although I have discovered some recyclable glassware that will do the job... )

[BlightyBrewer]

This sounds really interesting to me. B)

[norman]

Try the book FIRST STEPS IN YEAST CULTURING by Pierre Rajotte.From Beer Inn Print
www.beerinnprint.co.uk

[deadlydes]

i can vouch that that is a great book.
i used it to learn yeast culturing. i keep slants of all my yeasts now
take it easy

[Frothy]

I'm still experimenting - not having much luck with gelatin yet.

Matt

[norman]

I have found the easiest way to keep yeast is to bottle four pint bottles at the time of kegging,store these in the fridge,next time you brew open one of the bottles decant off the beer then recover the yeast sediment and make a starter.

[Reg]

QUOTE (norman @ Jul 14 2006, 09:14 AM) I have found the easiest way to keep yeast is to bottle four pint bottles at the time of kegging,store these in the fridge,next time you brew open one of the bottles decant off the beer then recover the yeast sediment and make a starter.
That's pretty much what I do at present, but I'm still interested in "proper" culturing techniques.

[norman]

by the time the boiling malt is ready to add to the culture bottle the glass I have decanted 6the beer into always seems to be EMPTY.