This weekend, I plan to brew my entry into the Saison Throwdown so I had to make some preparations.
As we have discussed before on this blog, yeast management is key to brewing great beer. With saisons, yeast is very important to the flavor profile of the beer so you need a good amount of healthy yeast for fermentation.
I made a yeast starter a few weeks ago. For the most part, I don’t prepare so far ahead for brews. My yeast starters tend to be made a few days before I am going to brew. Because of some vacation time I took and some free time I had prior to it, I was able to get the starter going.
It was a 3 liter starter and made the wort with enough dry malt extract (DME) to make that volume of a starter. Using the 10 to 1 rule, I measured out 300 grams of DME for a 3 liter starter.
After a few days of fermentation action, I stored the starter in the fridge until today. The long cold storage allowed most of the yeast to settle to the bottom of the gallon bottle. It was nice to see a thick ban of yeast in the bottle’s lower half.
If a starter is 2 liters or less, I usually don’t bother with this step but since my starter was chilled and I thought I could siphon the excess “beer” off of the yeast cake without disturbing it.
After the siphon, I have a thin layer of beer that is hanging out over the yeast cake. It’s enough to keep the yeast from stressing out and enough to help me get all of the yeast back into suspension for when I pitch. The bottle is now sitting at room temperature and will slowly get up to fermentation temperature over the next couple of days. I am focused now on making sure the yeast and the wort are at the same temp when I pitch.
Brew day should be Sunday. Stay tuned as the throwdown begins.
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