Lager Starter

[lmccrone]

I went to the Bright Brewery the other day and did the brewery tour (highly recommend), I got talking to the brewer about the difficulty of the huge starter you need to get a lager going and he spoke about some of the ideas he had if they were to ever do a proper lager.

Later I was thinking about how I could adapt this to my much smaller operation, one idea I had was to brew my first batch (45 liters), keg 20 liters and then add 20 liters of wort on top and put it back in the fermenting fridge. Not sure if this would work or not any one got any thoughts?

Cheers

Luke

 

[seamad]

How about fermenting 20 l first, kegging that then adding 45 onto yeast?

 

[QldKev]

How about fermenting 20 l first, kegging that then adding 45 onto yeast?

That's the way I'd do it

QldKev

 

[booargy]

That's the way I'd do it

QldKev

That the way I do it.

 

[Parks]

How about fermenting 20 l first, kegging that then adding 45 onto yeast?

I've done this exact thing recently.

If the yeast calculator tells me to make a 10L+ starter, which is often does then f($*king make some beer with it!

 

[jimi]

If you cube you could try filling 2 small cubes (instead of 1 large one) pitch yeast to one cube, after a few days add the second cube on top. It will reduce the intial volume of yeast required. It's pretty similar to other suggestions and a relatively common practise.

 

[micblair]

Fresh wort and pitching at high Krausen was enough to innoculate 42L beer and perform a healthy fermentation at 10-12C which took around 8 days, from a 5L starter grown at 15-18C from a single activator smack pack.