Brewing day 1 - Sunday - the yeast starter

No doubt this will jinx the entire enterprise, but I've decided to blog the second brew

I started on Sunday, to give the yeast starter a couple of days to do its stuff before it gets chucked into the beer. In the long term, I'd like to experiment a bit with cultivating yeast, either from packets or from bottled beer, if only to make it go a bit further. The instructions here look pretty comprehensive and not too frightening! Not to mention giving all the details I'm going through in this post... But for now I'm happy to keep using a Wyeast 'smack pack' yeast for each brew, after the first lot seemed to work so well. For this batch of beer I'm following the recipe for Belhaven 80' given in Graham Wheeler & Roger Protz's 'Brew Your Own Real Ale At Home', so decided to try the Wyeast 'Scottish' strain.

It gets the name 'smack pack' because that's what you do to it - when you're ready, whack the packet between your hands to mix the yeast and its nutrients, give it a shake and leave it somewhere with a temperature of 21c - 24c for 2 or 3 hours until it's swollen up.

The instructions on the back of the packet for making the starter are very straightforward. While you're waiting for the pack to start working, I sterilised all the equipment I was going to be using with a sterilising solution you get from homebrew places. So that's a litre storage jar that'll be used for the starter, a glass jug for measuring water and aerating the starter wort, scissors for opening the packet, a plastic spatula for stirring, a thermometer, and then a wipe of sterilising solution on some kitchen foil that'll cover the jar.

When the pack's been going a few hours it's time to make the starter wort - 100g of malt extract in a litre of water brought to the boil and then kept on a fast boil for 10 minutes. After this stage, to get the wort down to a temperature suitable for the yeast, I popped the jug in a sink full of cold water to which I added ice to bring it down more quickly. Stirring the wort brings the temperature down faster.

When it got to around 25c and falling it was time to aerate the thing. I poured the wort from the jug to the jar, quite slowly, twice to get the oxygen in solution that the yeast should feed on. Quick check of the final temperature (21c - 24c) and then shake the packet, snip it open and pour it in. That last picture's what it looks like when it's gone in.

Then it needs 2 days to produce more yeast...