Latest homebrewing plans

As a fairly frequent homebrewer - about twice a month here - you eventually succumb to the yeast. Unless you want to spring for a new pitch of yeast every time you brew, you have to get a strain that you want to use for a little while and re-pitch from batch to batch. (And if you're really out of your mind you bank agar slants so that you have your favorite strains at the ready and (with some serious planning) can brew with them whenever you wish.)

I had three beers in mind that I wanted to brew - a German Alt beer, a Berliner Weisse, and a French Biere de Garde. How forunate that all three are perfectly suited to the Wyeast 1007 strain! So last night I smacked a smack pack, innoculated some agar slants, and made a 3 liter yeast starter. This weekend I'll brew the Alt.

Two weekends after that I'll brew up a parti-gyle batch - one big mash, the runnings of which will create a hoppy American style wheat beer and a Berliner Weisse. The slurry from the Alt will be divided to pitch into both wheat beers. The Berliner Weisse will also get a dose of lactobacillus (which will also innoculate an agar slant, thank you very much).

Then a few weekends after that I'll brew up the Biere de Garde, pitched with the slurry from the American Wheat. I know I can squeeze a few more beers out of that slurry, so I think I'll experiment with a Pale Ale of some kind fermented with the German ale yeast after the B de G.

Here's the Alt recipe, just in case anyone is interested. We'll see how it turns out:

Grist:
5lbs Weyermann Lt. Munich
5lbs Weyermann Dark Munich
.5lb Weyermann Melanoidin
2oz Weyermann Carafa Special I

Mash at 150 degrees until starch is converted. Collect 6.75 gallons, boil down to 5.75 gallons over 75 minutes.

Hops:
1oz Mt. Rainier hop pellets, 6.2%AA @ 75 minutes
.25oz Mt. Rainier hop pellets, 6.2%AA @ 20 minutes

Whirlfloc tab with 15 minutes remaining. Going for OG 1.052. Pitch yeast from starter described above and ferment at 60 degrees until done.

You like?

Agar slants

Today I've decided to make some agar slants. The yeast that culturing is the Whitbread dry ale yeast, otherwise known as White Labs Dry English Ale yeast (WLP007) or Wyeast British Ale (1098). I made a few beers with this yeast and I was quite pleased. Made a great Brown Ale, Bitter, and hopefully a great Olde Ale. The Olde Ale is sitting in a secondary right now and the initial tasting on transfer was questionable. The good news is that it attenuated to almost 80% at 12% ABV!!!

Equipment:

See the equipment list here. Only additional equipment used is:

1) Test tubes with autoclavable screw on caps - these guys are great. Request the autoclavable caps.

Steps:

1) Prepare the medium - I added 100ml of 10 brix wort to a flask with a pinch of yeast nutrient, a pinch of 5.2, and half a tablespoon of agar. I heated this in a double boiler type situation with for about 15 minutes to dissolve the agar.

2) Fill the test tubes - Using a small funnel and the test tube grabber, I poured each test tube about 2/3 full. Very loosely screw a cap on each.

3) Set up the pressure cooker - The instructions for mine call for 2.5 quarts of water, just enough to cover the cooking rack. Yours will likely be different. I placed a glass pyrex dish in the pressure cooker and the top half of a petri dish inside the pyrex dish, so that I could...

4) Lay the test tubes in the petri dish lid - The bottom of the tube goes inside the petri dish lid and the capped end rests on the edge of the petri dish lid. This way the test tubes are resting so that the culture medium will solidify in a slanted configuration when they cool.

4b) You'll also want to put some distilled water in a pyrex container of some sort and cover it with foil. Place it in the pressure cooker along with the test tubes (I put it next to the pyrex dish that the tubes are in, not in the dish). You'll use this to cool the flamed innoculating loop.

5) Process at 15lbs for 15 minutes - Follow the instructions for your particular pressure cooker.

6) Wait... It will take a few hours for the whole thing to come down to room temperature. Just before everything is cooled down and you're ready to innoculate...

7) Set up to innoculate the slants - Have your yeast, flame, and inoculating loop ready. I also wear a dust mask so I don't breath my filthy germs into my culture medium. This should be done in the cleanest, most draft-free area of your house.

8) Open the lid to the pressure cooker - Seal the caps on the slants. Note: At this point, if you notice that the medium in the slants has not congealed, you'll need to start over. You either boiled the medium for too long and denatured the agar, or you didn't dissolve the agar enough and didn't get enough into the test tube.

9) Get ready to innoculate - Put the test tubes in a test tube rack, and bring the rack and cooled container of distilled water over to your innoculating area.

10) Set up your flame. Quickly unscrew the cap from one of the test tubes.

11) Quickly flame the inoculating loop to sterilize it and cool it in the distilled water.

12) Quickly dip the sterilized inoculating loop in the yeast sample.

13) Quickly dip the innoculating loop into the test tube and streak the agar slant.

14) Quickly screw the lid back on the test tube.

15) Repeat steps 11-14 for each test tube.

16) Allow the yeast to culture up in the test tube at room temperature - You'll need to burp the test tubes periodically. Once or twice a day quickly unscrew the cap to release any pressure that has built up and screw it back on.

17) Once you've reached a point where the test tube no longer releases CO2 as you burp it, you can store the slants in the fridge. I put them in a ziplock bag and put the name of the yeast and the date on the bag.

Now I've got this yeast at the ready when I want to brew with it. Naturally, I need to culture this up to a full pitchable amount of yeast, which takes about a week and a half (10ml starters to 100ml to final 2 to 4 liter starter). Most literature says that a refrigerated agar slant will last about 6 months. So if you're not going to use the agar slant within six months, you'll need to culture it up to a small starter and innoculate a new slant. I'll probably use this yeast again within the next 6 months for a batch (or two or four) and when I start culturing it up, at the 10ml starter stage, I'll just innoculate another slant.

Culturing Yeast Part 4

Aaaaaaand.... we're back.

So the last step in culturing up this yeast was to sample the 100ml starters to make sure that they fermented properly and grow them up to a full sized yeast starter. That and to innoculate the agar slants, but I'll post on that later.

I decanted some of the fermented wort (hereon refered to as beer) from each of the 100ml starters. Here they are. I knew those beer festival sample glasses would come in handy one day!

I tasted each one and each tasted exactly the same. Neutral, clean, no off flavors at all. Well attenuated. So the next step was to prepare a 3000ml yeast starter with some yeast nutrient, 5.2, and a drop of olive oil. The yeast slurry from each of the 100ml starters was pitched into cooled 3000ml starter and it was set on the stir plate to ferment out.

Culturing Yeast Pt 3

With our trio of 10ml yeast starters having fermented out, it's time to step them up to 100ml. I've read that it's best to step up at a rate of anywhere from 4:1 to 10:1. I go with 10:1. It has worked just fine for me, so I see no reason to drag the process out any longer than that.

Equipment (in addition to what was used in previous steps):

1) 100ml pyrex flasks

2) Foam stoppers - a stopper and airlock setup would work just fine too, but I prefer to use these guys

Steps:

1) Prepare the starters - fill the pyrex flasks with 100ml of 10 brix wort. The yeast nutrient and drop of olive oil can be used here too, though I bypassed that step this time. Stop up the flasks with the foam stoppers.

2) Sterilize the starters - flasks in a water bath on the stove top works just fine here. Boil for a few minutes to kill any dirtbag germs that might have made their way in there and allow them to come back down to room temperature.

3) Innoculate the starters - I sprayed sanitizer around the mouths of each 10ml test tube and the 100ml flasks before opening anything. I then decanted the top 5ml or so from each test tube, swirled up the remaining starter beer and yeast from the bottom of the tube, and dumped into the 100ml flask. Put the foam stopper back in there when done and give a gentle swirl to get everything mixed up and to aerate a bit.

4) Wait.

After a day we've got something that looks like this:

Cluturing Yeast Pt 2

As promised, here's some more on the latest steps in my yeast culturing project... We left off with a petri dish streaked with yeast from my slurry. Here's what it looks like now:

The next high-level steps are to:

1) Prepare 10ml starters

2) Innoculate those starters with single colonies from the petri dish

Equipment (in addition to what was used in the previous steps):

1) 10ml test tubes - I prepared three starters

2) Airlocks - I treated myself and got some of the fancy glass ones so that I could sterilize them in the canner if needed

3) Drilled stoppers - I was unable to find drilled stoppers that fit test tubes and would accept an airlock, so I was forced to take matters into my own hands. I took stoppers that fit the test tubes and drilled them myself. It's a huge help to have a drill press handy when doing this.

4) Autoclavable test tube rack - Mine has turned out to be not so autoclavable

5) 10ml pipette

6) Prepared sanitizing solution - Use this to fill the airlocks. I just use my handy spray bottle of Star San.

7) Olive oil and a tooth pick.

Steps:

1) Prepare the starters - Using the same 10brix wort (with a dash each of Five Star 5.2 and yeast nutrient, no agar this time) and the pipette, fill each test tube with 10ml of starter wort. Also at this time, I dip the tooth pick in the olive oil, and put a tiny drop in each of the test tubes. I won't get into that in this space, but here's the rationale behind it (the fatty acids in the olive oil are a substitute for aeration of the wort). Put the stoppers and airlocks in. Fill the airlocks with sanitizer. Presumably you've already got the test tubes in the rack.

2) Sterilize the starters - This is a basic water bath procedure. Place the rack with the starters in your stainless steel sauce pan. Add enough water to the bottom to come about 1/3 of the way up the test tubes. Heat the water to a simmer. Wait for the starters to come up to a simmer and then give them about 10 minutes. Take off of the heat and allow them to cool to room temperature. Now you've got yourself some sterile 10ml starters. Note: at the same time that I'm doing this, I also like to prepare my sterile distilled water for cooling the innoculating loop. Put some distilled water in a small pyrex flask, cover with foil, and let it serilize in the sauce pan next to the rack.

3) Innoculate the starters - Take the starters to the clean, draft free area where your petri dish is hanging out. Put on your dust mask to contain your disgusting germs. Flame and cool your innoculating loop. Open up the petri dish. Quickly grab a small colony from the center of the petri dish with the innoculating loop, quickly open one of the starters, and quickly add the colony to the starter. Quickly put the stopper and airlock back in the starter. Did I mention that you should act quickly? Quickly repeat until all starters are innoculated.

4) Wait - Let your starters culture up in a clean, draft free room temperature environment. You should see activity within a day or two.

Next steps... Once these starters have finshed we'll repeat the above steps with 100ml starters, innoculating them with the 10ml starters.

Culturing yeast

This weekend I got around to setting up some agar slants and petri dishes in an effort to culture up some yeast. I have a slurry of Cal Ale yeast that has gone through several pitches and I'm going to streak a petri dish to isolate colonies of what hopefully will be my "house" yeast strain. I've been re-pitching this slurry at a temperature slightly lower than what is recommended for the strain (65° as opposed to 68°), so this is an experiment to see if the yeast has adapted to a slightly different environment and taken on a different character (i.e. produces a different tasting beer).

There are definite risks in this experiment. For example, since this slurry has been re-pitched several times, I'm quite sure that it's not 100% sanitary. I could easily wind up isolating a colony (or colonies) of wild yeast, bacteria, a mutated strain, who knows what... So what I'll probably wind up doing from a high level is:

1) Streak the petri dish to isolate colonies

2) Ferment three small samples of wort with three separate colonies

3) Taste the fermented wort and hopefully find that one of them is acceptable

4a) Inoculate an agar slant from the best sample

4b) Culture up a starter for a full 5 gallon brew from the best sample and hope that the resulting beer is awesome

Here are the steps that I followed to make create the culture medium for the agar slants and petri dish:

Equipment:

1) Wort - I usually save my last runnings from a brew day and boil them down to around 10 brix on the refractometer. Saves me from having to buy malt extract.

2) Agar - 1 tbsp per cup of wort. This stuff has to be simmered for a little while to dissolve before pouring into the petri dish or test tubes. You can find it in most health food stores - it's a vegan gelatin substitute.

3) Yeast nutrient - I add a pinch per cup of wort.

4) Five Star 5.2 - Since I'm boiling down last runnings, I like to make sure that the pH of my medium is stable, so I add a pinch of 5.2 to the wort before simmering.

5) Glass petri dish

6) Test tubes with screw on caps for agar slants - I get these. There's an option for autoclavable caps, which is really important.

7) Small funnel for pouring medium into slants

8) Test tube grabber - don't want to handle hot test tubes if you don't have to

9) Inoculating loop

10) Pyrex dish with autoclavable lid - I was lucky to just have this lying around the house. When you culture the petri dish, you want it to grow in a sanitary environment. So you need to enclose it in something. Pyrex glass is perfectly autoclavable, but the lid can be tricky. I tried my darndest to get Pyrex to tell me whether or not this lid would hold up in a pressure cooker at 15lbs. Of course they wouldn't give me a definitive yes, so I just went for it and when the lid didn't melt, I knew I was in business.

11) Pressure cooker - I think this is a 12 quart model, not sure. It's made by Mirro and I got it on eBay for a pretty reasonable price. Also great for canning stock!

12) Yeast to streak the petri dish with

13) Propane torch to flame the inoculating loop

14) Sterile distilled water in a small pyrex measuring cup, covered with foil - to cool the inoculating loop

15) Small stainless steel sauce pan to simmer the wort

And here are the steps that have been taken so far:

1) Set up the pressure cooker - Put the bottom down and add in the recommended amount of water. Place the glass pyrex dish in the center. Put the bottom half of the petri dish in the pyrex dish. Put the distilled water in the pyrex measuring cup next to - not in - the pyrex dish.

2) Simmer the wort, yeast nutrient, 5.2, and agar (this is the culture medium) for a few minutes in a small stainless steel sauce pan until the agar is all dissolved. Not too long though, because supposedly under too much heat you can denature the agar and it won't congeal.

3) Pour culture medium into the bottom half of the petri dish to a depth of about 1/8 to 1/4".

4) Place the plastic lid on the pyrex dish - I put it on kind of half cocked, so that it will vent, but just stable enough that I can put stuff on top of it, like....

5) Put the top half of the petri dish on top of the plastic lid, open side up.

6) Using the funnel and grabber, fill the test tubes with culture medium to about 75%. Be careful, they fill up quickly.

7) Screw the caps on the tubes very loosely and lay them down inside the top half of the petri dish. The idea is to keep them on an angle so that when they cool and the medium congeals it's in a slanted configuration. It just so happens for me that the top half of the petri dish is perfect for this.

8) Seal the pressure cooker according to its instructions.

9) Process on 15lbs for 15 minutes, as per its instructions. On mine, I keep it on high heat until steam starts to come out of the vent, then put the 15lb weight on it. Once the weight starts rocking gently, reduce heat to maintain and turn the heat off after 15 minutes.

10) Allow the pressure cooker to cool to room temperature - this takes a good few hours.

11) Set up to inoculate the petri dish - have your yeast, flame, and inoculating loop ready. I also wear a dust mask so I don't breath my filthy germs into my culture medium. This should be done in the cleanest, most draft-free area of your house.

12) Open the lid to the pressure cooker. Seal the caps on the slants and close the lid to the pyrex dish as quickly as possible. Note: I seal the slants in a sanitized sandwich bag and keep them in my fermentation fridge until I'm ready to use them. Also note: You should see that your culture medium has congealed and is solid. If it's not, (i.e. you pick up an agar slant and it's still liquid) something went wrong and you need to start over. You either denatured the agar, didn't dissolve it all the way, or didn't use enough. Also also note: There will be condensation in the slants and in the pyrex dish. I haven't figured out how to deal with that yet.

13) Bring the pyrex dish, top half of the petri dish, and distilled water over to where your inoculating area is set up. Peel back the foil on the distilled water. Open up your yeast sample.

14) Flame the inoculating loop to sterilize it and cool it in the distilled water.

15) Quickly dip the sterilized inoculating loop in the yeast sample.

16) Open the lid to the pyrex dish and streak the culture medium in the bottom half of the petri dish. The standard method of doing this is to run a zig-zag pattern in the four corners of the plate (I know, a circle doesn't have corners), dragging the fourth one into the center. The idea is that by the time you've swiped the sample across the four outer quadrants of the plate, you're down to single cells by the time you get into the middle. This is where your single cell colonies will be found. Something like this:




17) At this point I sprayed sanitizer in the top half of the petri dish, then quickly flamed it to dry it. There's probably a better way to keep the top half of the petri dish sterilized.

18) Put the lid on the petri dish, then put the lid on the pyrex dish.

19) Keep the whole thing in the same clean, draft-free area if you can. I can't, so I keep it in the most clean, draft-free area that is also inconspicuous. Periodically burp the lid as the yeast grows on the medium.

Next steps...

After a few days, I should have small colonies of yeast in the middle of the petri dish that have grown up from single cells. These will be used to make small samples of test beer as described above. When I get to that next step (hopefully tomorrow) I'll post more.

Counting yeast

So, as promised, here's some detail on my yeast counting adventure the other night...

I ordered a smack pack of the Wyeast Danish Lager yeast about two months ago. I knew that I'd need to build up a starter in order to have enough healthy yeast to pitch into my 5.5 gallons of 1.054 wort. So, about four days before brew day I made a starter:

3.5 liters of 10˚ Plato wort boiled with 1/2 tsp. of yeast nutrient. Cooled it to room temperature, pitched the smack pack, and set it on the stir plate to ferment out and build up the yeast count. Once fermentation was finished, I crashed it to about 32˚ until brew day. Decanted the "beer" off the top of the yeast slurry (by siphoning, not pouring) and was left with about 300ml of yeast slurry to pitch into my wort.

Here's everything needed to do the job:

1. 4000ml erlenmeyer flask - I have 1000ml and 2000ml flasks, but they just don't do the job. No room for enough wort to build big yeast counts, and more importantly, not enough room for krausen. Had too many overflow problems with the smaller flasks.
2. 10˚ Plato Wort - I take my last runnings from brew day and boil them down to about 10˚ brix on the refractometer (brix/Plato, close enough). I then fill up mason jars with the near-boiling wort, cap, bring them down to room temp, then refrigerate until needed.
3. Yeast nutrient - the yeast nutrient gets boiled for about 10 minutes in the flask with the wort to sanitze before making the starter.
4. Foam stopper - these dudes are great. I get them from Northern Brewer, and they're perfect for yeast starters. easier than doing an airlock because I can keep it in the flask while I boil and sterilize the whole bit.
5. Stir bar - I've used a few different sizes and seem to have the best luck with the smaller ones. They don't get as much of a vortex in the flask, but they don't get thrown nearly as often as the larger ones. Throw it in the boiling starter wort shortly before it's finished to sanitize it.
   
6. DIY stir plate - the standard CPU fan and magnet project.

So on brew day I wanted to know about how much yeast was in that 300ml or so of slurry. How? Gotta count it on a hemocytometer under a microscope. Not exactly the easiest thing for most folks to do in their basement or garage or spare bedroom, but when you take a hobby too far....

Equipment:

1. 10ml pipette
2. Pipette pump (10ml)
3. (2) 100ml graduated cylinders
4. Hemocytometer and slide cover
5. Methylene blue dye
6. Microscope

I filled each of the 100ml cylinders to 90ml with distilled water. Used the pipette and pump to take a 10ml sample from the yeast slurry and add it to one of the cylinders. Now I had a 10:1 dillution of slurry. Then I took 10ml from that cylinder and added it to the other one. Now I had a 100:1 dillution - this makes it easier to count.

The theory behind the hemocytometer is that it has a 0.0001 cubic mm chamber that you can view under a microscope and count the amount of stuff that's in there. Usually blood or sperms, but brewers use them to count yeast cells. So try not to get yourself a used hemocytometer.

I added a drop of methylene blue stain to the cylinder (more on that later), used a dropper to take a sample from it, put it on the hemocytometer, and put the slide cover on. Then I viewed it under the microscope to count the cells at 400X magnification.

The 0.0001 cubic mm hemocytometer chamber is divided up into a five by five grid. You could count what you've got in all 25 boxes, but that's a lot of work. Standard practice is to count five of the boxes - the four corners and the one in the middle.

So I counted the yeast cells in five of the boxes. (My hemocytometer has two 0.0001 cubic mm chambers, so I counted both.) I counted 239 in one and 286 in the other. So now how do we figure out how much yeast is in the slurry? Multiply the cell count (239 or 286) by the proportion of boxes counted (5:1) by the dillution factor (100:1) and divide by the hemocytometer chamber volume (0.0001 cubic mm = 0.0001 ml).

(239cells*5*100)/0.0001ml = 1,195,000,000 cells/ml

or

1.195x10^9 cells/ml

or

1.430x10^9 cells/ml for the second chamber counted with 286 cells

Now, the rule of thumb is that you're supposed to pitch 1,000,000 (1.0x10^6) cells per ml of 1˚ Plato of wort. I had 5.5 gallons of 13.0˚ brix wort. 5.5 gallons = 2.08x10^4ml, and we can assume that 13.0 brix = 13.0 Plato. So I needed:

13.0˚ x (1.0x10^6 cells per ml/1˚) = 1.3x10^7 cells/ml

2.08x10^4ml * 1.3x10^7 cells/ml = 2.7x10^11 cells

So how much of my yeast slurry would give me 2.7x10^11 cells?

2.7x10^11 cells / 1.195x10^9 cells/ml = 226 ml

or

2.7x10^11 cells / 1.430x10^9 cells/ml = 189 ml

Hope you love math. Oh, and what about that methylene blue stain? The idea is that healthy yeast will reject it, and dead yeast will be stained blue under the microscope. I don't know if I didn't add enough dye or what, but I couldn't see any stained cells. So I skipped that part of the exercise.

And how exactly is this supposed to help me when my erlenmeyer flask only has 500ml marks? Not much. I guesstimated about 300ml of slurry in the flask, but it easily could have been 200. Or 250. Or 350. And then what about my 5.5 gallons of wort? That could have easily been 5.25, which would throw my calculations off by about 5%.

So what's a poor homebrewer to do? Just pitch the whole damn slurry! RDWHAHB!

Oktoberfest day

Sunday is brew day. I get to pitch that wonderful yeast that I've been culturing up into a full 5.5 gallons of wort. Here's the lowdown on the Oktoberfest:

10lbs Wyermann Vienna malt
.5 lbs Weyermann Melanoidin malt

Mash in at 122˚F for 20 minutes, 1qt:1lb liquor to grist ratio. Add in enough boiling water to rest at 152˚ for one hour. Sparge and collect 7.25 gallons. Boil down to 5.75 gallons, OG 1.054. Hops:

.75oz Polish Marynka pellets for duration of boil
.5oz Hallertau with 20 minutes remaining in boil

Add whilrfloc tab at 15 minutes remaining, 1/2tsp rehydrated yeast nutrient with 10 minutes remaining. Cool down to 50˚, O2 for two minutes, pitch lager yeast slurry.

As we brew, I dipped into the Maine stash again. Tried:

Andrew's English Pale Ale: Copper with a huge, rocky off white head. Soapy, perfumey, almost "Belgian" aroma. Pretty significant hop aroma, citrusy, earthy. Not much malt aroma. Flavor was hop balanced again, carbonation high. Medium-high bitterness. Interesting beer. I'd like to try it directly from the source and have the opportunity to ask the brewer what's going on here. The estery, yeasty aromas up front are confusing, but overall it's a pretty drinkable beer. Also love that the label slipped right off, making it easy for me to put the bottle into my homebrew stash.

Stone Coast Knuckleball Bock

Polished off the last of the Maine cheese this evening while watching the Giants preseason contest versus the Lions of Detroit. Also sampled this beer:

Stone Coast Knuckleball Bock: Third beer from the right on the page above. Clear, deep amber, with a thin tan head. Bready munich malt aromas with some fruity esters and alcohol. Full bodied with pretty high carbonation. Malty, but not sweet. Just the right touch of hop bitterness. Great beer, wouldn't be stunned if I found out that it's brewed with an ale yeast.

My lager yeast starter is still going. I'll crash it tomorrow or Saturday in time to decant the starter beer and have plenty of lager yeast raring to go for the Oktoberfest brew on Sunday. Two weeks in the primary plus three to four in the secondary - should be ready for the middle of September.

In other yeasty news, I think I'm going to get a bottle of Castelain, steal the yeast from the bottle and culture it up to brew a biere de garde. Thoughts?

Meet my friends

I've watched them grow up from single colonies of lager yeast on a petri dish, to 10ml test tubes, to 100ml flasks (seen left), and last night they graduated up to 1000ml yeast starters. Brings a tear to me eye. This weekend I'll watch them unite to ferment 5 gallons of Oktoberfest. I hope I don't wind up with empty nest syndrome.

Next time I go through the process of culturing up yeast from scratch like this I'll post on all of the steps.

Yeast Starter

Tonight is amateur biologist night. I've got 1.8 liters of 10.2 brix starter wort (with 1/2 tsp. yeast nutrient) a-boilin' on the stove. I'll cool it down, pitch a Wyeast smack pack (Belgian Abbey Yeast II) into it, and set it on the homemade stir plate for a couple days to build up enough yeast for my Dubbel homebrew. I'm not a big Belgian beer guy, but figure I need to do this to expand my horizons. Not sure whether I should keg it or try to bottle condition it. Any opinions, leave them below.

Tonight 'R' and I shared some of the Maine cheese that we picked up on our latest trip to Portland. One was a cheddar made with veggie rennet that was very bitter and made more enjoyable by a melba toast and some garlic and onion jam. The other was a very nice pecorino romano type, quite tasty all on its own. See, we don't know exactly who made these cheeses and what they call them as we bought them a few weeks ago and they weren't labeled in their packages. So, remove them from the fridge after forgetting about them for a little while and, voila - what exactly are we eating?

Sampled these with some Maine beers:

Black Bear Pail Ale: Nice citrusy American hop aroma. Very fruity, estery flavor, significant bitterness. Interesting blend of American hops and what would seem to be a fruity English yeast strain.

Sebago Runabout Red: Malty all around, the kind of rich caramel aroma you look for in an American Red. Definitely not very hoppy. Dry finish. Not distinctive, very drinkable.

Also, I finished the night with the very frustrating homebrewed barleywine. Long story short, I brewed a barleywine several months ago. It's not carbonating fully, despite additional healthy yeast added to the bottles. It's pretty good, but just not quite there. Starting to doubt that it ever will get there...