Bottling Yeast Starters

[pmanz]

Was wondering if anybody had any thought on or experience with sterilizing some bottles with a bit of wort in it. I thought I had heard of a guy who bottled up a dozen or so 12 oz bottles with a 2L starter distributed amongst them and then growing up a starter from what he had in the bottle. I was thinking of trying it myself with a fresh batch of yeast.

Not sure if any of theis made sense, I'm just starting to try to get into yeast handling.

[DannyW]

I've not heard of anyone storing unfermented wort in beer bottles with crown caps, but I suppose it *might* work. Heat the wort and bottles in a water bath to boiling, then pull and cap immediately. Will the bottles implode and make a mess? I dunno. Will the heat ruin the bottle cap seals? I dunno that either.

The more usual way to do this is to use mason jars. Some say you can do them in a water bath, but I always put them in the pressure cooker for 20min at 15psi to avoid any chance of botulism.

[BN Pacifist]

This is basically the method Charlie Papazian describes in The Complete Joy of Homebrewing. Make sure to preheat your bottles so that they don't break when you pour the near-boiling wort into them. Charlie suggests highly hopping the wort to help inhibit bacterial growth.

[BrewBum]

The poster is talking about adding yeast to this as well I thought, or did I misinterpret this line.

thought I had heard of a guy who bottled up a dozen or so 12 oz bottles with a 2L starter distributed amongst them and then growing up a starter from what he had in the bottle.

I guess he could mean a starter without yeast, I wasn't sure.

[DannyW]

Charlie suggests highly hopping the wort to help inhibit bacterial growth.

Is that one of those "charlie-isms" that is perhaps showing its age? His Popeness says don't hop starters, because the hops will cause the same inhibition to the yeast (smother or coat them, I think) that they do to the bacteria.

[Bugeater]

There is no way you can bottle unfermented wort with yeast added. That would be a great recipe for bottle bombs.

I routinely pressure can starter wort in quart jars. I do a 5 gallon batch every 4 or 5 months. Details on that can be found by doing a search on this site as well as on many other sites.

Culturing yeast from a bottle is something you need to start about 10 days before your planned brew day. Before you open the bottle of beer, be sure you sanitize it quite well. Gently pour the beer into your glass, leaving about a 1/4" of beer and yeast in the bottom of the bottle. Into the bottle pour only about 50 ml of starter wort. Sanitize a small balloon and slip that over the top of the bottle for an air lock and then give the bottle a good shake to aerate the starter. The balloon airlock thing is a little ghetto, but it has been used by top prison hooch brewers for years and sure beats trying to find a drilled stopper that small..

After a couple of days, prepare another 500 ml of wort in a flask or jar and dump the contents of the beer bottle into that. Once that ferments out (18-24 hours) you can then step that up again to whatever volume of starter you want for your beer (up to 5 liters).

I have done this several times with yeast from Chimay Red with great results. Just remember not to step the starter up by more than a factor of 10 each time, hence the 50 ml > 500 ml > 5000 ml progression.

Wayne
Bugeater Brewing Company

[Henning1966]

just to as a question about an airlock on a bottle what about using the small on of these inverted from normal use over the top of the bottle

[pmanz]

I guess I should clarify...
I was thinking of taking my 3068 Wyeast smack-pack, making a starter. After the starter has fermented out, split it up into sanitized, cold-capped bottles for storage and storing them at around 32˚. Then next time I want to make a hef, prepare some starter wort, cool it and pour the contents of one of the bottles into it to kick off the starter.

I guess I haven't even begun to think of making slants and was looking for an easier and less expensive (equipment-wise) way to store yeast for later usage.

I also wanted to try to harvest yeast off of the fermentation and save it this way.

thanks for all of the feedback so far...