Starters and Oxygen

Now that we have a couple successful batches under our belts we have begun to move onto some more 'advanced' brewing techniques. Now 'advanced' is in quotes because, well, they aren't really 'advanced.' These are things that we should have probably been doing from the start that we are just now figuring out.

This past weekend doing a 5 gallon Amber Ale we used a yeast starter for the first time. A yeast starter is pretty much just a mini sized batch of beer that is used to generate more yeast cells. I made about a 1 quart starter 3 days before our brew day. It was neat watching the little batch go through all the steps very quickly. Almost immediately after pitching the yeast into the starter I began to see activity with a large amount of krausen forming for about a 15 hours. After that the krausen died down but the airlock was still bubbling along. Anyways, y'all don't care about the specifics. All you need to know is that we grew a lot of yeast.

Another thing that we did differently this time was to use pure oxygen from a welding canister to oxygenate our wort. For the past 6 batches we had just been shaking a 5 gallon glass carboy to oxygenate it. 5 gallons of beer = ~40lbs. Needless to say that is a huge pain in the ass. Now all we had to do was dip our diffusion stone into the carboy and turn on the O2 for about 30 seconds. Much easier.

By using a yeast starter and the pure O2 our 5 gallon batch began fermenting within 4 hours. We have come a long way since our first batch where it took almost 40 hours to see the first bubbles from fermentation.