I'm about a quarter of the way through reading New Brewing Lager Beer (Noonan). In the yeast chapter, culturing section, referring to creating starters off of slants, he says that "in professional practice, a swab of yeast from the starter is cultured on a slide and microscopically examined for contamination before the parent culture is pitched".
But, I've heard from other sources that the percentage of bacteria which could ruin a starter is small enough that searching one slide is absolutely no guarantee of a clean pitch.
Does anyone out there know if there is a procedure for which the slide method works? The way Noonan refers to culturing on the slide makes me wonder if there is a way to beef up the cell count on the medium.
I'm certainly not a microbiologist, so I'd also love to know how feasible this would be to do at home.
