Tag Archives: M44

Jan 202417Wed

Typical M44 yeast starter scaled down for size. Normally I’d put this on 24 – 30 hours before pitching, but Brewfather has always reminded me 3 days out to make the starter, so I thought I’d give it a tad longer this time around. Should be pitching on Friday at noon, which is about 52 hours.

Update: should have pitched a bit sooner. It did take off mightily, but if I’m aiming for peak Krausen within the starter before pitching then 26 – 28 hours is possibly the sweet spot.

May 202304Thu

I prepared the starter yesterday for tomorrow’s brew, keeping it on the stir plate with the smaller, banded spinner for around 24 hours. When I switched it off it rapidly went for good Krausen, but this evening it seems to have receded and looks almost lifeless. Too long on the stir plate / too far in advance of the brew? Will prepare just 24 hours ahead next time. Didn’t use the fermentation chamber either this time around, instead keeping it in the cool bathroom at around 19℃.

Brew Day Update

I was planning to pitch my remaining packet of dried yeast instead of this apparently lifeless starter, but there’s still the tiniest signs of fermentation from the layer of yeast at the bottom, so I’ll throw it in anyway and will follow up with dried yeast if nothing happens after 24 hours.

#wisdom: let’s keep starter time to 24 hours ahead of brew, with half of that on the stir plate.

Feb 202228Mon

Nothing extravagant here, the usual starter knocked up ahead of brew day in my large Erlenmeyer flask. 1.5 litres water, 184g dark DME, boiled for 20 minutes along with some Lipohop and yeast nutrients. I added the magnetic stir-bar for the last 5 minutes in order to sterilise it, and it’s amazing how much more foam is generated from there on in – almost enough to overwhelm the Lipohop.

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Nov 202116Tue

Knocked up a starter for Thursday’s brew today, and it seems that about ¼ teaspoon of Lipohop is a good amount to prevent boil-over in the large Erlenmeyer with the quantities employed. I also used black DME this time around because I’ve got a bag knocking around, so why not?

  • 1.5 litres water
  • 185 grams dark DME
  • ¼ teaspoon Lipohop
  • ½ teaspoon yeast nutrient
  • 1 packet Mangrove Jack’s M44 American yeast

Took about 90 minutes to chill down to pitching temperature after the uneventful 20 minute boil, yeast was added at 21℃ then it went onto the stir plate. Foam started to appear a couple of hours later, by the 24 hour mark we could call it Krausen and the temperature is up to 24℃, so I’m moving it to a cooler room in order to slow things down – it’s still around 18 hours until I’ll be adding this to the wort.

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Aug 202105Thu

Looks like Yeti’s starter has hit High Krausen and is starting to recede, which means I may have been a little early in kicking this off 2 days before I need it. 24-36 hours should be enough next time.

M44 yeast starter after 24 hours
Aug 202104Wed

With the Erlenmeyer flask sitting on its stir plate and the starter well and truly underway I’m re-reading my notes from the last Yeti’s starter, which was coincidentally the first one I ever made. Since then I’ve done maybe half a dozen of these and am a lot more comfortable with the procedure, so much so that this time around I didn’t take any pictures or gravity readings, planning simply to rely on visual cues to confirm it’s ready to go in 2 days’ time. The only thing different this time around is the addition of Lipohop, an anti-foaming agent made using natural ingredients, and given that I didn’t have to clean the stovetop or nanny over the flask I think it’s safe to say I’ll be using it again.

Full boil: 123g DME and 1 litre of water on full chat with Lipohop

Brew Notes

  • 123g DME
  • 1 litre water
  • 1/6 TSP (approx) Lipohop

Lipohop is an anti-foaming agent, approximate dose should be between 0.02 and 0.05 grams per litre. I think 1 TSP is normally around 2 grams, so complete guess is to aim for about a sixth of one small TSP. The small tar-like blob easily slid off the teaspoon, which had been sitting in boiling water for a few minutes to sterilise.

The Erlenmeyer flask was prepared by boiling some water in it to sterilise, then dumping that out in order to rapidly dry the interior, before being placed on scales for addition of DME using PET bottle-derived funnel. Water added to just above the 1 litre mark (guess anyway since there are only 800 and 1200 ml marks) then placed on boil and Lipohop added as well as the stirrer magnet, which I’d also sterilised with hot water along with the spoon.

Lipohop appears to be very effective indeed at suppressing foam during boil, and any bubbles which are produced (mainly from the stirrer magnet) immediately disappear on the surface. There are some small black particles visible in the boiling wort, presumably solid hop matter which won’t dissolve. Boiling the whole lot for 20 minutes should at least guarantee it’s sterile. Colour also seems a little darker than my usual starter, at least while it’s still boiling. Maybe I could get away with a smaller dose of Lipohop next time?

1 packet of M44 yeast pitched at 22℃, placed on stir plate 11:00, Wed 4 Aug.

May 202104Tue

I’m going to finally brew this imperial stout that I’ve been planning for a couple of weeks, and in the spirit of forever trying something new I’m preparing a yeast starter, using Brewfather for guidance. I’ve figured out that the quantity of yeast specified for most of the recipes on that platform actually implies creation of a starter, but it’s not immediately obvious unless you open up the yeast calculator and and hit ‘save starter’ at which point it tells you how much DME and water to add to the indicated yeast. If you calculate the amount without ‘save starter’ it’s the equivalent of pitching the yeast directly, and the amount required suddenly jumps up significantly.

Anyway, having tweaked the Yeti recipe to reflect my local fermentables’ values I turned my attention to yeast, and worked out that I’ll be needing 1.8 litres of water and 177g of DME if I want to stick with using just one sachet of M44. The calculator tells me this will result in 398 billion cells, which is 2 billion over target. My biggest Erlenmeyer flask is two litres so 1.8 doesn’t leave me with a lot of head room in the event that my yeast should go ballistic while being stirred overnight, but building for two sachets of M44 (which worked out as needed 1.3 litres and 128g DME) seemed a bit counter-productive to the whole idea of growing yeast in a starter, not to mention unnecessarily expensive: DME is cheap, yeast is not.

I decided to go for the single sachet approach, encouraged by the fact that Brewfather assumes an OG of 1.036 for DME and I have a feeling mine will be closer to 1.040, which is what some labs recommend as an ideal gravity for growing healthy yeast. Adding 100 ml to cover evaporation during the boil I filled a large saucepan to just below 2 litres and cranked up the heat, decanting exactly 177g of Muntons Light Spraymalt once we had a boil going. 10 minutes later we were done, and I’d obviously lost more than 100 ml because the pan’s internal scale read just over 1.5 litres, maybe 1.65 but certainly less than 1.75. Oh well – the mixture was transferred to my sanitised 2 litre Erlenmeyer flask and measured a smidge below 1.6 litres once I’d drawn off a sample for gravity measurement and started chilling in cool water.

OG for my sample measured 1.040 at 364 ℃ which equates to 1.045 once you correct for temperature. Taking that value back to Brewfather I unticked the ‘calculate starter size’ box in order to allow me to input not only the gravity but also the amount of water, and I saw that with my one pack of M44 and 1.5 litres at 1.045 I’d be looking at around 408 billion cells – 11 billion over my target. That’s not too shabby at all; I’m not concerned about over-pitching 3 or 4%, 5 points over the ideal gravity shouldn’t stress the yeast too much, and I’ve got some extra head room in my flask for safety.

The stir bar was already in the flask from when that was sanitised by boiling a couple of inches of water (worked just fine on the halogen hob) so it was just a question of getting it down to temperature before pitching that M44. Not wanting to bet everything on borosilicate’s supposed resilience to thermal shock, I started off by putting the flask in a saucepan ¼ filled with cool water, then added cold water and left it to drop for 10 minutes before replacing the water with fresh, ice-cold water. Even so it was only 17.5 ℃ and therefore going to take ages to reach my target of 18, so I poured in two trays of ice cubes and checked in every couple of minutes using the infrared thermometer. Didn’t take long at all before I was at 18.1 ℃ so I threw in the yeast, refitted the tin foil lid, and gave it a good swirl before placing the flask on the stir plate at 13:17.

Over the next few hours my starter lightened considerably in colour and gained a layer of froth, which had stopped spinning when I checked in at 21:00. It also seemed as though the wort immediately below the foam was slightly darker, which I took to mean that the yeast was congregating in the lower part of the flask and a few mm of darker wort (spent?) had floated to the top. On giving the flask a good shake the colour evened out again and the foam head rose up quite dramatically, but soon settled down. On increasing the rate of spin to just below 50% I’m now seeing the foam mobile again. Only one last thing to do before turning in for the night: put the flask in a thin plastic bag. I don’t know what the Krausen’s going to get up to over the next few hours and I don’t want to find out if my stir plate is waterproof any more than I want to find out if our smoke alarms are loud enough.