13 March 2016

New (Super) Yeast!

I hear good things about WLP#090 San Diego Super Yeast. No-one locally sells it, but a bit of googling allowed me to get it a vial of it via mail order.

I'm going to try brewing some of my previous recipes and see if it's as good as I've heard. Assuming positive results, I'll use Brulosophy's method for harvesting from starters and keep this going as my go-to strain.

With a view to test driving this yeast on a black IPA, I made a starter today. Using Brewdad's calculator, I built this starter using 1.5l of water, 151g of dried malt extract and a half teaspoon of yeast nutrient. After cooling the wort in the laundry tub, I pitched the yeast. Unfortunately, I hadn't noticed that WLP#090 likes to ferment between 18 and 20C, rather than the 18 to 22C I'm more used to with ale yeasts. This combined with my underestimating the temperature in the house meant that I've had to make use of the aircon to keep the lounge cool enough. This narrow range may force me to get my other freezer fixed and do all my fermenting at more tightly controlled temperatures in future.

In three days, I'll divide this between two containers, one 1 litre and one 500ml theoretically containing 200 billion and 100 billion cells respectively. I'll cold crash them both in the fridge and use the larger of the two for my next brew and keep the smaller as the basis for the next starter.

Boiling starter wort
Highly sophisticated cooling method
And now I just need to keep the lounge below 20C for a few days

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