Starter for the Biere de Table

Boiling the 1 L of Starter Wort

After playing with the arrangement of the magnets in the stirplate for hours, I finally found an arrangement that has been working somewhat consistently for the starter I made today for the Wyeast 3725 Biere de Garde yeast.

Aerating the Starter

I had to take two more smaller rare earth magnets from the hard drive of my old laptop and attach those to the first two rare earth magnets from my old PC hard drive. I then shortened the distance between the magnets in the stir plate and the stir bar in the erlenmeyer flask and things have been working well so far. I only have duck tape currently holding the magnets in place however, so I've been spending lots of time pushing the magnets back into place. The attraction between the magnets and the stir bar pushes them together until the magnets begin to rub against the top of the stir plate box, slowing down the rotation of the stir plate. I'll have to find that sweet spot for the magnets and mount them permanently with epoxy prior to brewing up the next starter for the soured Biere de Garde.

I brewed up this 1 L starter at about 1.040 OG and pitched the Wyeast activator package without popping the internal nutrient package. Hopefully this starter will allow me to just about double the yeast population prior to pitching them into the Biere de Table I'll be brewing in the next few days. I was surprised to find that even with a relatively low OG Biere de Table (about 1.043 OG) I still needed additional yeast cells to ferment the beer cleanly. So it seems that using starters to ferment will help me produce better beer in the future, especially with high gravity brews. Hopefully together with the new oxygen system I picked up to add pure oxygen to the wort prior to pitching yeast, these starters will provide large populations of very healthy yeast, resulting in great beer.