Charlottesville Area Masters of Real Ale

Mark your calendars because next month's CAMRA meeting will be at Starr Hill in Crozet.  Master Brewer Mark Thompson has been kind enough to host our regular monthly meeting at his brewery on February 3rd at 6:30 pm.

He has also invited us to bring homebrews, as well.  Since we will be limited in our time to taste, considering Mark will take us on a tour of the facility and have a Q&A about brewing, if you bring homebrew we are asking for members to only bring enough for everyone to taste one or two of our individual beers.

Please set aside the date, and start brainstorming up questions for a professional brewer.  He is one of the lucky few who gets to brew for a living and we will get to pick his brain.

The location is at the brewery in Crozet, and the link to a map and the address are here:

http://www.starrhill.com/venue

Starr Hill Brewery
5391 Three Notched Rd
Crozet, VA 22932

Thanks and we look forward to seeing you there,

- Jamey

I got a question from hoptical_allusions about getting some of the yeast cake from Starr Hill next week, so I forwarded it on to Mark and he said it was cool.

Here's the deal: The yeast that will be available will be the Chico strain.  You will need to bring something to put it in.  My recommendation would be something like a mason jar.  A vessel that has a wide mouth and you can seal it up.  I'd gonna clean one up and fill it with a Star San mixture, but they have commercial grade sanitizers there.

I've borrowed yeast from them before and it is amazing.  It lead to a very vigorous fermentation and no lag time.

Spread the word.

For those of us who don't know what Chico strain is, google says :

http://www.wyeastlab.com/hb_yeaststrain_detail.cfm?ID=5

(defined as chico strain here : http://www.cellar-homebrew.com/store/catalog/American-Ale-Yeast-1056XL-p-574.html )

concise version is : American Ale

I had been planning to bring some strawberry-raspberry-chocolate-wheat ale, but the keg recently informed me that it is empty.  I suppose this is what happens when several friends and family drink several beers...

I'll bring a little mead.

Good point.  Thanks for clarifying what Chico is.  I made an assumption that everyone would know what I was talking about.

It is a very clean, attenuative and flexible yeast.  I used this one a lot (and it's dry version Safale 05)

Great! Thanks for the heads up. I'm looking forward to making a Vanilla Bourbon Porter. See you all on Tuesday. I wonder how long I can sit on the yeast before having to use it?

Refrigerated, it can last quite a while.

But the longer it sits, the more you are gonna need to ramp it up with a healthy starter so it is active and ready at pitch.

I agree with what Jamey posted.  You would be fine sitting on it, refrigerated, or up to two or three weeks.  After that, you will have lost some cell viablility and should grow it back up in a starter.  This assumes, of course, that the vessel you are storing it in was very well sanitized and covered (though you should burp it if it is sealed, or else any CO2 pressure generated may reach levels that will kill the yeast).

How was the meeting?  I was in a research meeting talking about the estimation of parameters for esoteric probability distributions and parallel programming. I am bummed that I missed out on scooping some yeast and sharing beer!

One of these days, I will make it to another meeting.

Also, as I've said in other places, refrigerated yeast that has had time to settle and sort of hibernate will last for a few months.  I had living yeast in a collection I'd taken 13 months prior, but it wasn't very active (the beer is good despite the abused yeast, there's almost none left already thanks to parents and friends.)  I usually take 2-3 liters worth of cake from my batches and throw it into thoroughly cleaned and sanitized 1 litre mason jars.  I fill it to the brim and wear sanitized rubber gloves (if for nothing else, to keep sanitizer off my skin).  Adding a liter of yeast cake from a prior batch seems to very quickly jumpstart fermentation.  I never use starters because my brewing schedule is way too random to support anything like "planning", but I haven't ever needed to either.  That said, I approach my brewing nebulously.  As in, I don't try to hit precise styles.  I brew for the purpose of finding something I haven't tried before.