Journal of Brewing

They say you’re the most knowledgeable when you know the least. It was only a matter of time before I would try new techniques to develop consistency and repeatable results. Before brew day I worked on a new technique that I had been reading about: a yeast starter. I had noticed in my previous brews that my final gravity had not been getting as low as I had wanted it to. The beer was coming out very tasty, however there seemed to be a good amount of residual sugar left over which could only be attributed to the remaining sugar that was not consumed by the fermentation process.

I made a 2 liter (~2 quart) yeast starter following the directions provided on BYO.com in their article entitled “Beauty and the Yeast”. It was a terribly simple process to make the starter. I used a sanitized 1 gallon carlo rossi jug as the vessel for my starter. I felt it was the easiest to sanitize and gave adequate headspace for the mini wort to foam up and such.

I prepared the starter 24 hours before I was ready to brew. By the next morning it had already flocculated a decent amount. I got right on preparing the wort.