Recipes are recipes. And unless you have a difficult time following a recipe, the contribution that a good recipe has on your final brew in a fixed variable towards making better beer. Lets face it: yeast do most of the hard work for us brewers. When you are still green to brewing, managing your fermentation is the best way to start moving from good beer to better beer. And who doesnt want better beer!?Fermentation is everything in the brewing process. Managing yeast cell counts (pitching rate), yeast health, and temperature control are crucial factors for getting the perfect fermentation. Any good experienced brewer will tell you to make a yeast starter. However, for the greener brewer that only has 2-3 batches under their belt jumping right into starters, while certainly good for yeast management, is not exactly the easiest step towards making better beer. By not overly complicating your brew day you can focus more on mastering the basics of wort boiling, chilling, and sanitation.A simple and affordable alternative is to use some of the high quality dry yeasts available on the market from companies like Danstar and Fermentis. The nicest thing about dry yeast is that one package generally contains more than enough cells to ferment any average gravity wort (O.G. < 1.050). The choice to use dry yeast usually makes for a simpler brewing process and a slightly cheaper (which can be a relief with the cost of hops and malt still on the rise); albeit at the sacrifice of the variety you can get with liquid cultures from Wyeast and Whitelabs.
The critical factor for using dry yeast is the re-hydration step. Many beginner recipes will simply have you sprinkle the dry yeast over the chilled wort. This is not the best practice. Some sources cite that this practice results in up to a 50% decrease in viability of the yeast cell countmeaning many of those cells you pitched just dont survive the re-hydration. The best way to ensure the greatest effectiveness of your dries yeast is to rehydrate in clean, sterile water. The best technique is to boil up a pint of water to sterilize it at the start of your brew session in a small sauce pan. The cover the pan with the lid and set it aside during your brew session. Just as the boil ends and before you start the chilling process is when you should start to rehydrate the yeast. Open up the sauce pan and sprinkle the dry yeast over the top of the water and recover. After you go through your wort chilling process the yeast should be almost entirely rehydrate at that point. Anticipate at least 15-minutes to rehydrate.
You will know the yeast is full hydrated when the water now looks a little creamy and cloudy. There should be very little if any grains of yeast still floating around. Its OK to gently swirl the sauce pan a bit if you think there is too much stuck to the sides or not all the yeast seems to have taken the plunge into the water (sometimes they can seem a bit hydrophobic and are stuck on top of the water). Now that the yeast is ready you can pour it right into your wort. If you are using a bucket fermentor as most of us did just starting out pouring is a snap. If you use a narrow necked carboy be sure to include a funnel in your sanitation procedure while cleaning and prepping the fermentor. You did sanitize your fermentor right????
Properly rehydrated dry yeast can help you make a cheap and easy leap forward in the quality of your brewing. Master this part of your brew process and youll be even more ready to move on to yeast starters and controlled fermentation temp before you know.
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