The Yeast Thief

Brewing beer seems like a lot of work, but the hardest work will not be done by me but by this little mama:

Saccharomyces cerevisae or brewer's yeast is the magic ingredient that'll transfor this somewhat dubiously smelling liquid called wort into actual beer.







The yeast will ferment all the sugars in the wort (well, almost all but near enough for now), converting them into

• more yeast (good but not the real aim) 
• carbon dioxide (good because I want fizz and, all innuendo aside, a bit of head)
• alcohol (which sets beer aside from pop in the first place)

I could just buy yeast from specialised stores, like I did with most of my other ingredients, but those 6 years of academic toil and meddling with micro-organisms have instilled in me a willingness to do this the hard way: I'm going to cultivate my own yeast! **insert Cackling Laughter à la Mad Scientist about here somewhere**

Well..."my own" means "a succesful brewer's" in this case, and that brewer's not me. Not yet anyway.

Dupont brews an excellent beer called Moinette which has a basic flavour I find absolutely charming: fruity and full-bodied, reminiscent of UK ales and hence perfectly suited for my first attempts at brewing an IPA. Since Moinette has about 8.5% ABV, it should be capable of rousing my wort to acceptable levels of booziness, as I'm aiming for about 7% myself. 

My attempts to break into the Dupont brewery and liberate a couple billions of yeast cells from their labs were sadly unsuccessful (but that's another story) so I decided to take a more legally and morally acceptable approach at  pilfering by collecting the yeast sediment from a bottle of Moinette I happened to have lying (*) about in my cellar.

(*) standing, really. All beer snobs store their beer upright. Unless it's gueuze. Because we like to be picky about beer.

So:

1. made a small batch of wort by adding 16g of wort extract to 100ml of water
2. brought to the boil, which also sterilises the wort
3. disinfected a 1l yeast bottle with alcohol
4. poured the hot wort into the bottle and closed it
5. cooled the wort to hand temperature by swirling it under the cold tap
6. opened the Moinette
7. carefully decanted the beer into a glass, leaving about one centimeter of beer, along with the sediment
8. swirled the beer bottle to bring the sediment back into suspension
9. disinfected the mouth of the beer bottled with alcohol (you never know where that has been)
10. poured the sediment into the yeast bottle

Drum roll! Applause! Californian wave! Cheering and chanting and high fives aplenty! 6 years of grueling university tutelage prove themselves well spent.

Witness the star players as they line up for encores:

 

Now the hardest bit: waiting for my babies to multiply.

The tension is killing me.

Greetz

Jo