Felinfoel Double Dragon

[Barley Water]

Thank you very much, that is very helpful. I was very interested in the fact that you can actually get yeast to start in 45 minutes, I thought I was doing well to get things going inside of 12 hours with a pretty big starter. I guess those commerical brewers need to turn batches around as quickly as possible so they really concentrate on stuff like that.

I was originally planning on doing three lagers in a row but discovered I actually had less beer than I thought I had this weekend. I think what I am going to do to rectify that situation is try the London Pride recipie in your book. I should be able to get it into secondary within a week so if I time things right, I can do a slightly extended dyacetyl rest on the lager while at the same time fermenting the ale. I'm glad I don't do this for a living, I have the worst time with production scheduling.

[Graham]

Thank you very much, that is very helpful. I was very interested in the fact that you can actually get yeast to start in 45 minutes, I thought I was doing well to get things going inside of 12 hours with a pretty big starter. I guess those commercial brewers need to turn batches around as quickly as possible so they really concentrate on stuff like that.

Well, perhaps 45 minutes is pushing it a bit, but certainly it is going well before I go to bed after a brewing session. By morning, the stuff is all over the place. Mind you, there is one hell of a lot of live yeast slurry in a polystyrene coffee cup. It has just come out a fermentor and is straining at the leash. At one time I used to take a vacuum-flask filled with ice-cubes to the brewery, and empty out the ice cubes just before they filled it. But they started to supply it in their own polystyrene coffee cups with a lid on. I think they got fed up with someone having to leave the shop and go into the brewery to fill vessels with yeast for home brewers, so they now do it in advance and keeping it in their fridge.

I don't have much knowledge of modern home brew yeasts, except from what I read here. I don't brew anywhere near frequently enough these days to experiment with them. Once you have used an ex-brewery live yeast slurry, it is hard to bring yourself to use anything else, and I have cultured relationships with a number of small breweries over the years.

Even in the good old days when we had a local home brew shop, he supplied yeast in very much the same way. When the (Morlands) dray turned up to deliver his beer supplies (he also had a real ale off-license), the draymen brought a bucket of yeast with them. Fresh every Friday morning - so I have always been spoiled in this respect.

[Barley Water]

What I do with the yeast depends on what I am making. My usual yeast routine for an ale is to make a 1 liter starter and just pitch that (with the usual oxigenation etc). With lagers, I make up a gallon starter and pour off the fermented wort then pitch the slurry in the bottom. With German wheat beer, I just pitch straight out of the tube or packet, stir it up and let it go. Now that I think about it, I really don't know exactly how long it takes to get things started. I usually pitch the yeast then put the carboy into my fermentation refigerator. I usually check on it about 12 hours or so later (if I remember) and it is always going pretty well. I then forget about it for a week or so (two weeks for lagers) then rack the beer into a secondardy fermentor. I then just let the beer sit in secondary until I am ready to keg (which depends on production, consumption and other factors). I have gotten so lazy that I don't even bother to measure terminal gravity, I just look for bubbles then taste the stuff to see if it has attenuated (and so far with ales I have not ever really had a problem). Sometimes moving the beer to secondary causes the yeast the kick off a little again but I usually just let nature take it's course.

The above comments about using second generation (or more) yeast are interesting. I wonder how this affects the flavor of the beer? The problem I have is that I rarely use the same yeast twice in a row because I rarely brew the same type of beer two batches in a row. The only exception to that is lager brewing. I have had attenuation problems with lagers in the past so I now make sure that I have a gigantic starter prepared (or use yeast cakes from previous batches). So far, thank God, that is eliminated any problem.

[Barley Water]

That is very interesting Daab. I don't know that I want to start a yeast farm but some types of yeast I use alot. It would be very handy to have the makings of a starter with second or third generation yeast that I could just kick start and use within a couple of days. Have you noticed that the yeast profile starts to migrate any when doing this?

I guess the other thing you guys have that I don't is access to some of the yeast straight from some of your better brewers. I know most of the micros and brew pubs around here just use the same strains I can get from White Labs or Wyeast. Some of the stuff you guys are messing with has been around since before God was a pup, that is very cool. It does somewhat surprise me however since one of the biggest things a brewery can do to make its products different is use a unique yeast strain. I don't know that I would be real happy to just give away my competative advantage that way. Maybe they figure us homebrewers will muck it up anyway so they are not worried.