adamK wrote:Ozwald wrote:Don't let me forget about this again, I just looked at the clock & gotta run to work. I'll edit this out with a real answer later this morning, if I remember.
This is a bump reminder...
Thanks, I actually did look for this last night, but I couldn't remember what the thread was called & I was slightly preoccupied with something else:WARNING: BEER NERD PORN. You have been advised.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ooapz-OP2M
And while the video's not as good if you're not getting one, she talks sexier in this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIm3fLc3tLQ
Now back to the earlier questions:
adamK wrote:Ozwald wrote:
It's also a local wild yeast from our Sourdough Creek, which is probably giving me a bunch of wiggle room as far as mutation, but it's definitely not infected with any sort of bacteria. The others are 1056 (my biggest worry of the bunch), the Ommegang strain & 2 more jars that are escaping me at the moment - and I'm just too lazy to go look at the moment.
What have you made with that? That sounds pretty interesting.
I thought for short term (such as described here) it was best to store the yeast under beer, and rinse closer to use. I thought I remember that from a Brew Strong, though have no idea when. I think it had to do with the transfer "waking up" the yeast which could cause them to use their glycogen reserves, which then cannot be built again with the water. I trust your experience more than my memory, but am now curious.
Bozeman has a little bit of history with sourdough bread, hence them naming the creek & the neighborhood on the SE of town. The yeast itself has a really unique character, it's much sweeter than a SF sourdough. If you bake with it, your bread won't be as crusty as with the SF strain & if you brew with it, it attenuates like hell. You can get a really dry beer but packed with a banana type sweetness. I bastardized my golden strong recipe & came out with a banana cream pie beer that was sweet, but still dry as shit. It was also in the neighborhood of 9%, but by flavor you'd guess maybe 6% at most. It got a little dangerous since they went down so quick.
As for the yeast storage. Keep in mind these main points:
- - It's not just alcoholic water, there's some other stuff in there. Some good, some not-good (I didn't say bad, but definitely not in the helpful category)
- With my technique, the jars, lids, water are getting sterilized with a good boil, also driving the oxygen out of the water.
- I prefer to do multiple rinses. Think of it like triple distilled liquor, which is why I frequently refer to the parts you're rinsing out as the heads & tails. I don't like to take my chances on one pass, I'll get a little more each time & can really dial in my yeast selection. It's a lot more work & time, but I've found the results are far more than worth it.
My technique in a nutshell: The yeast get cold crashed prior to dumping the beer & entering the rinsing process. They've been put to sleep for at least 24 hours before I even begin, so their activity is extremely low at this point. Since I'm doing multiple rinses, I don't want to warm them back up & crash over and over. That would definitely force them to stress & use up their reserves, so my rinses are done fairly cool - not straight out of the fridge, but I don't let them warm up all the way to room temp either. After they're rinsed the final time, they settle to the bottom & have a neutral medium (sterile, de-oxed water). There's no nutrients but they've been asleep for a couple days by this point. They're not exactly looking for nutrients. When it comes time to brew, they're run though a starter either to build cell count or at the very least to get them active, all the while sucking up all those nutrients from the starter wort. (I should also note that I don't use extract at all for my starters, I have a 2 gallon mashtun & recipes for a 1, 2 & 3 gallon starter).
When you're storing them under beer, you're really not giving them many nutrients (if any), and the only reason they might need them is to live in a less than ideal medium. Remember in Yeast vs. Wild, they eat sugars, produce alcohol to poison the environment for everything else, and when they're done, they eat the alcohol back up. They don't want to live in an alcoholic environment, it's their temporary guard. Note that I said 'storing' under beer. They are getting nutrients, but those are coming from the wort, not the beer. By the time they're all settled in & done with the starter, there's not much benefit from the beer anymore. If my brew day gets moved back 1 day & I can't pitch at high krausen, it's not ideal but I'm not too worried about it - decant, pitch & say fuck it. For 7 days (as stated in the specific instance that spawned this thread), I'll find time to rinse & do another starter so I can pitch at or near the sweet spot.
I'm sure that my methods aren't perfect, but they work with tremendous success & utilize the equipment that I (& the majority of homebrewers) have. Just don't try to take care of more than 5 strains at a time or you'll be back where I was, turning your kitchen into a yeast lab & a 20-30 hr/wk part-time job at the same time.
BN Army // 13th Mountain Division 
