Yeast meets wets

You know you're a problem homebrewer when your main motivation for brewing a batch is to harvest the yeast afterward for your next batch.

Aren't they just adorable!

I've had these two vials of liquid yeast sitting around for about a year. One's a Burton ale yeast and the other is a Scottish. I thought I'd better get going and use them for something before they went south. So I brewed a batch of beer mainly to get the viable cells propagating. I harvested it, and now have a crop of fresh Burton ale yeast sitting safely in my fridge. Oh yeah, of course I did get some beer out of that too. Don't forget that. I'll blog that one when they're done bottle conditioning.

The Scottish I just made into a starter, which turned out a nice bunch of new yeast. I'll rinse that and store it for a brew next weekend. That'll be a pale ale, which itself is just a stepping stone batch to get the yeast ready for the porter recipe I'm working on. That's gonna be my bomb-ass winter brew this year, I'm sure of it.

I just ordered the still kind of new book, Yeast by Jamil Zainasheff and Chris White (of White Labs, where my yeast came from). I'll get into that this weekend as well. I need me some book learnin'.

Yeast! Yeah. Brewers don't make beer--yeast do. We're just yeast wranglers. Get along little Saccharomyces cerevisiae!