Nobody dresses like the guy on that bottle.  Nobody.

I’ll come right out and admit that I’ve tried this experiment before and failed.  But I’ve never tried it in front of an audience so what the hell, here goes nothing.  The idea is to harvest some yeast from an unfiltered / bottle conditioned beer, in this case Rogue’s Shakespeare Stout.  I’ve heard from reliable sources (namely the brewmaster at Rogue) that this can be done with this beer.  This is particularly convenient because I really like the Shakespeare Stout – enough that I would pay 6 bucks for 22 oz of it, which I did earlier this evening.  But if this experiment works out then I actually paid 6 bucks for some Pacman yeast (that’s what they call it, I swear) and the beer was free.  If this works.

Last time I wrote about a tiny starter I was grinding in a mortar and pestle and mashing in a coffee thermos.  Crazy, I know.  The problems with that method were A) it’s hard to maintain 150ish degrees in a coffee thermos for an hour and B) we broke our mortar and pestle.  Actually just the pestle.  So in between then and now there was another, un-blogged starter experiment wherein a coffee grinder was used to crush the grain and a higher quality thermos was pre-heated with boiling water before the mash.  The grinder worked pretty well but the thermos still lost heat too quickly (it’s time to get a better thermos).

It’s not perfect but it’ll do.

So a new approach was taken in this experiment:  pre-heat a ramekin in a 200 degree oven, pour the 150ish degree water into it, mix in the grains, put into the oven where it won’t loose heat.  I’ll cut to the chase here – it didn’t work.  The mash dropped to 130 in a heartbeat, the oven wouldn’t stay warm enough, and a new method had to be devised at the last minute.  I tried putting the mash back in the kettle and keeping it over low heat, but it was almost impossible to maintain a steady temperature this way so that was abandoned.  And by this point the mash temperature was dropping to 130 again and the grains had been in the water for about 10 minutes.  Next method:  put the mash back in the ramekin, put the ramekin back in the oven, crank the oven to 400 to heat up the mash and turn the oven off when the temperature of the mash hits 140-145.  This worked out okay.  The temperature never really stabilized but at least it stayed between 140 and 160 for about 20 or 30 minutes.

Look at that kettle.  It’s absurd.

Time to end this charade – the mash is strained over the kettle and the wort is boiled for 15 minutes.  The OG only hit 1.030 – which didn’t surprise me much given the weird crush and the temperature fiasco – but that should be good enough to get a starter going.  The stout was carefully decanted (read as:  consumed) with about a quarter to a half inch left in the bottle and the wort was poured on top of it after being chilled to about 65 degrees.  Then I took out my frustration by shaking the crap out of it.  In fact, as I type this I’m taking breaks here and there to shake the crap out of that bottle of starter.  Because here’s the thing, the last time I tried to get some Pacman yeast the starter never actually started and the whole operation was a bust.  And that time I had used Malta Goya as the wort instead of putting in all the energy to create a 1.030 gravity wort FROM FRICKIN’ SCRATCH!

What did I learn tonight?  Mash in a coffee thermos and just don’t worry about the temperature drop so much.  The starter I made a few nights ago mashed for about 20 minutes, dropped 25 degrees and had an OG of 1.040.  It took off in a few hours and fermented out in a day and a half.  I’ll stick with that method next time.

As for this one, I’ll post results in the next day or two.