So I harvested some yeast from my back yard, you can read about that here. After harvesting I had put together some plates per Bootleg biology. The plates were pretty easy to put together and one thing I couldn’t do is sterilizing with a pressure cooker. I’m at a point right now where I’m just playing around and if I ever get really serious into keeping my own yeast strain I’ll definitely look into a pressure cooker for sterilizing. I thing I had learned was keep the extra agar solution and place in a jar. I can scope that out and dilute it later to help grow the colony. Oh well, I tossed it this time.

After the plates cooled I had taken a sample of the backyard yeast and streaked the plate. I did this 4 separate times on the same plate. Allowed a few days to pass and poof, we have growth. From this I had pulled another plate and took one sample off the original plate and streaked it again to really insure I have a single strain. I did look under a microscope but it was so packed not sure what I was really looking at.

After a few it was finally time to start building up a colony of yeast. I had pulled together about 10mL of 1.020 wort and after sterilizing my loop with the flame I pulled a small yeast sample off the second plate and placed it into the 10mL of wort and set aside, keeping the lid slightly ajar so pressure doesn’t building during fermentation. After about a day I started to see some activity in the 10mL test tube and after 3 days it pretty much stopped. I had given the, now beer a good shake to ensure all the yeast is in solution and created a 100mL of 1.020 wort to start building up the colony more.

Activity kicked right up and continued for a few days and finally slowed down. Stepped up the yeast starter with 600mL of 1.040 wort and let that ferment out for a few days. After that now its ready for a small batch. Was going to prop up for a 5 gallon(18L) batch.