I don’t know of any breweries around here that wouldn’t be happy to give away yeast. Most of the time they have more than they need.
Send me a PM if you want me to hook you up with Wyeast.
I go to our local brewery with a sanitized growler, capped of course, with masking tape on it labeled with my name, phone number, and desired type of yeast (if I know what they have and what I want). I talk to the head brewer and leave the growler with him. When he harvests (they don’t do it every day), he calls me up and lets me know my growler is ready.
My last brew was 10 gallons of 1.090 Skotrat’s Traquir House clone using Wy1728 slurry from a local brewery. It was done in 5 days.
That’s awesome to tear through that in 5 days. IIRC I’ve hit FG with that recipe in ~ 8 days, but I wasn’t using a brewery repitch. Great recipe.
I have an experiment in my basement that I need to plate. I think about it, and then I remember the amount of work that it took to reassemble a Ringwood culture that I plated back in 1994. That effort pales in comparison to the amount of work that it would take to separate and identify all of the microflora in a wild mixed culture, especially, if contains multiple saccharomyces yeast strains. Giant colony analysis has to be performed to identify the morphological features of each strain. Once identified, there’s no getting around fermentation performance and sensory evaluation, which means that one has to make a small batch of wort for each strain.
I am holding out for the freak occurrence of having a true top-cropper show up in one of my samples. Any true top-cropper that I find in the wild was more than likely left here by someone in the past because true top-cropping behavior is a sign of domestication.
I try to buy local and that includes grain usually, because I repitch almost exclusively now that I have a good rotation - 2206 and 802 for lagers, 1768, 1728 and WL 041 for a lot of my ales. I also go from light to amber/copper to dark and then step back through that progression to brew light colored beers, all without any problem getting the SRM matched fine.
If necessary, I will do a starter, but more often than not, when introducing a new strain, I will do a small batch first and pitch from that into successively larger batches to get to a 10 gallon batch.
Cheers to our LHBS and local craft brewers - they are both great sources.
Maintaining a yeast bank is definitely a lot of work. Maintaining a yeast bank was almost a necessity back in the nineties, especially the early nineties. Many of the cultures that are available today from Wyeast and White Labs were only available on slant via Maribeth’s company Brewtek (e.g., Wyeast 1450 was originally Brewtek CL-50). Today, one has to be a yeast geek who brews in order to have an excuse to play with yeast, not a brewer who maintains a yeast bank in order to brew for yeast management to be a long-term viable extension of the hobby.
With that said, even yeast geeks who do not have access to -80C refrigeration have their limits. I maintained over forty cultures in my old bank. I decided to limit my new bank to only those cultures that I cannot acquire via the home brew trade. None of the cultures in my current bank were received as White Labs or Wyeast cultures. Most were acquired on slant or in lyophilized form at considerable expense from culture collections in the U.S. and the UK (all of these cultures are old, non-current production strains). A few were plated from commercial bottle-conditioned beers.
The main reason I did it was to maintain a supply of CL-50. Once I got Wyeast to take it on, there was no need. At this point, I haven’t found another strain that I want to use that isn’t available commercially. If I do, I may reconsider.
I refer to my local homebrew store as the yeast and miscellaneous item shop.
The main reason I did it was to maintain a supply of CL-50. Once I got Wyeast to take it on, there was no need. At this point, I haven’t found another strain that I want to use that isn’t available commercially. If I do, I may reconsider.
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I totally agree with you. I have yet to find the yeast culture that trips my trigger. I brewed with CL-50 a couple of times back in the nineties. It’s a great general purpose yeast strain, but it is not the one for me. The Brewtek strain that came closest to being the one was CL-170. I believe that Wyeast eventually offered that strain as 1768, but 1768 never seemed to produce the lollipop ester that I got from CL-170. I recall Drew mentioning that Maribeth still has all the Brewtek cultures banked while speaking with him at NHC. I would love know the origin of CL-170. That culture and CL-660 are the cultures from the Brewtek collection that I would like to see made available from alternate sources.
By the way, I shot a few photos while you and Drew were recording your piece with Chip.
Nice pics. I see Sean there and I was right next to him. Anyone get pics of Keith “Here’s you bag Mr Beechum”?