MAKING A STARTER
BY JAMIL ZAINASHEFF
ou might have heard your fellow
brewers talking about starters and
how important they are for making
great beer. Proper fermentation is
what sets apart great beers from just OK
beers, and starters can help by ensuring a
beer with the correct appearance, flavor,
body and aroma profile. The resulting beer
is also clean, complete, consistent and
reproducible.
In order to have proper fermentation, you
must have the right amount of clean,
healthy yeast to ferment your wort. If you’re
a professional brewer with plenty of yeast
every few days, this isn’t too hard. If you’re
an amateur brewer, you’re often starting
with a new pitch of yeast, and employing a
starter can often improve the performance
of that yeast.
Many brewers have questions about the
“best way” to make and use starters. The
answers to these questions are not only
based on my experience and lab work, but
from conversations with David Logsdon,
founder/owner of Wyeast Laboratories,
Inc., Greg Doss, Wyeast microbiologist, and
Neva Parker, White Labs Inc. laboratory
manager. I would also like to thank Graham
Sanders for his extensive feedback on this
article.
Q: WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF A STARTER?
A starter is a small volume of wort that yeast
use as an initial step to become healthy,
multiply and prepare themselves to ferment
a batch of beer.
The starter’s purpose is to create enough
clean, healthy yeast to ferment your batch
under optimal conditions. The primary
focus of a starter should always be yeast
health first and increased cell growth sec-
ond. It is much better to have a smaller
number of very healthy, young cells than it
is to have a large number of weak cells. As
Logsdon puts it, “Would you rather have an
excess of 80-year-old people building your
house or a smaller amount of really healthy
20-year-olds?”
Q: DO I ALWAYS NEED TO MAKE A
STARTER?
No. However, in many cases, making a
starter will provide better fermentation.
You do not want to make a high gravity
starter to grow yeast. As a ballpark measure-
ment, us