When you are in college saving some coin here and there helps a lot. Since I am the young-in of the group and still in college, I want to try some money saving techniques for brewing. The first thing I want to try is simply reusing yeast, and second is to see if I can’t brew one cheap ass beer, that doesn’t make me cringe when I drink it.
So the big question here is: “How do you farm yeast, and can it be done easily on a home brew size scale?” The answer: we don’t know, and the internet isn’t really helping us out at all. There seems to be this big rumor out there that it can’t be done easily, and if you do succeed your yeast will only last three generations before it starts mutating and tasting weird. This begs the question: “How the hell do commercial beers get consistent strains of yeast if they are that susceptible to mutation?” The yeast can’t be that hard to keep from mutating, otherwise consistent brewing would be nigh impossible with the rate at which yeast multiply and the rate at brewing beer goes through yeast.
Some sources on the internet claim that yeast farming isn’t difficult, hard or even a very touchy process. The major problem with reusing yeast, is separating it from your trub in your last brew. Trub is the nasty yeast byproducts left after fermentation that settle to the bottom, and can really screw up the taste of your next beer. “They” say that you can basically take your beer out of the carboy, pour in the sterile water, mix up the yest (and trub) pour it into a jar and let the yeast settle out from the trub. This is the approach I will take, when I try to yeast farm.
Now to properly test this I will have to brew the same brew two or three times and see if the taste changes dramatically from brew to brew. If these tests succeed it means that we can invest in some fancy yeast strains, and use they for a large number of brews. This is an exciting idea so I hope it works.
If we can successfully reuse yeast the next experiment for me to try after this is to see how cheap of a brew I can make. Just to give an idea of how cheap this can get I did some simple math. For a comparator I am using AHS Southern Brown Ale.
- Extract Liquid Yeast = $.86 a glass
- Extract DryYeast = $.72 a glass
- Extract Farmed Yeast = $.66 a glass
- All Grain Farmed Yeast = $.49 a glass
Now the last one will be the hardest because I want to estimate what if we bought bulk or just grains. So according to the Brown ale recipe there are 6.5lbs base grains and 1.75lbs specialty grains. So I am just going to price out a random base grain and a random specialty grain accordingly and see how much it costs. I will also guess 3 ounces of Kent Golding hops
- Non-bulk = $.61 a glass
- Bulk = $.49 a glass
This is an interesting result, to know that kits are about the same price as bulk.
Tags: cost saving, reusing, yeast
I am still pretty early in my “homebrewing career” (about 1.5 years) and I do reuse yeast quite a bit, but more in the troublefree ways than any other. I typically don’t try to cultivate much or keep for the long haul. I have tried it to some degree in the past, but I don’t really have the patience for it. Or at least I haven’t so far.
I always use White Labs yeast, so to try to maximize utilization, I will tend to plan for at least 2 batches at a time. I will brew and then plan to brew 4-5 days later when the primary is finished. Then I just siphon off the beer to the secondary and pour my next cooled batch right on top. An added benefit to this technique is that yeast is raring to go. I had one recent batch finish in the primary within 24 hours with good attenuation using this technique.
Along these same lines, I currently have 4 pale ale batches in fermenters. For those I brewed 2 batches at a time (essentially 2 long days of brewing). I still used 1 vial of white labs, but I made a starter to increase the volume so I could split it into 2 batches from the beginning. Batches 3 and 4 were poured on top of the yeast from 1 and 2.
Using this technique, I have brewed up to a string of 4 different beers on the same yeast cake. Each beer was progressively stronger by design, and with each batch I added some yeast nutrients.
All this is to say that there are ways to cost effectively reuse yeast without too much trouble. As far as storing and cultivating, any experimenting I have done was based on Papazian’s Art of Homebrewing book and this site: http://www.bodensatz.com/staticpages/index.php?page=20030128212525422
Cheers.
Troy,
Well for starters I have only been brewing for a few months now, so you have more experience than I. Luckily the guys I brew have all the experience, and I get to use that to my advantage.
Actually I did hear about this method, and I thought it was a good approach. My goal was to end up storing yeast in viles for later use, so I didn’t research this approach all that much. I do have a question about this approach, how exactly do you go about removing the trub from the yeast? Do you just pour it off before adding the new batch, have a conical fermenter, or simply pour the new batch on top and not worry about it?
That is a good approach, we will have to make sure we do this when we start brewing 10 gallon batches.
Also, I am currently waiting on Bill to finish reading Papazian’s book, so I can. I definitely need to read it.
~James
P.S. Lets hope the block quotes worked, otherwise this post is going to look awful
Been doing some homebrewing for a couple of years now. Looked into the whole yeast farming thing about a year or so ago. How do the big breweries do it? They don’t recycle the yeast meaning, they continually propagate the same strain and take pieces off of the “Mother” as they go, some of the breweries freeze these “pieces” for later use, others use far more technical methods but, the point is they aren’t usually taking it from one batch and putting it into another. Two problems do come up with this continuous propagation method if you were to do it at home. 1). Storage, yes, yeast can stay alive for months on end in low alcohol environments but just for how many months still remains a question. 2). Alcohol kills yeast in high enough concentrations. I think the easiest way to get around this issue is to continually add water with your sugars to the “Mother”. This should help to regulate it if the sugars are used sparingly. And since you are scooping some of the alcohol out with every “Piece” you take it should help to maintain an even alcohol balance within the “Mother”. As far as the sugars go, one could whip up a simple batch of extract and water blend and keep it refrigerated. Given that everything is sterile before hand, the risk of contamination should be quite low.
Why haven’t I done this myself, well, I did for two batches but, I found that I don’t do my batches frequent enough, unfortunately, to merit a dedicated supply of yeast. I usually opt for the cheap version of dry yeast. I know, it’s sad but, still makes good enough beer for me.