BeerBorg

I was just picking up supplies for a porter I'm brewing Tuesday. I thought I had DME at home, but do not. I have until 5 to go buy some, but my honeydew list needs attention. My question is... can I use corn sugar to make the "wort"? If so, what is the downside? I'll be using it on Nottingham. It is 2 weeks old and I'd like to use it over the fresh package I have sitting in the fridge.

I'm pretty sure the answer is no on the sugar. You want to pitch a healthy starter and you won't have all the essential nutrients etc. available that the yeast need to produce daughter cells.

Also if you are using Notty you shouldn't make a starter for dry yeast as they are "treated" differently. You can re-hydrate or just direct pitch.

I direct pitch with Notty all the time and often it tries to blow the lid off the fermenter.

Waiting for the seasoned veterans to chime in with this one, but if memory serves correctly, making starter wort out of corn sugar will make the yeast lazy when you put the starter into your beer's wort. They will only want to chomp on the dextrose and sucrose and ignore the maltose.

I ducked out and went back to the LHBS while my wife was showering. She didn't even know I was gone.

BB This was a harvested Notty. I bought a second pack, just in case I needed one, last time out. I just didn't want to use it unless I had to. Thinking about it, the harvested yeast was only 2 weeks old, so I could've pitched the new. The harvested still has plenty of shelf life on it.

Phil, now that you say it, it does ring a bell... Thank you both.

I'll start the starter tomorrow and will be brewing Tuesday.

mtsoxfan wrote:I was just picking up supplies for a porter I'm brewing Tuesday. I thought I had DME at home, but do not. I have until 5 to go buy some, but my honeydew list needs attention. My question is... can I use corn sugar to make the "wort"? If so, what is the downside? I'll be using it on Nottingham. It is 2 weeks old and I'd like to use it over the fresh package I have sitting in the fridge.

One day I stopped by Princeton Homebrew to pick up ingredients for a recipe and they were all out of corn sugar, it was an adjunct addition to increase the alcohol content of the beer. It seems Al Buck the owner of East Coast Yeast had been by earlier and bought up all the corn sugar for what I guessed was his yeast propagation process. Again I'm not claiming to know anything about mass producing yeast strains on a commercial scale, but what else could he have needed all of that corn sugar for?

It makes sense to me. He may have been using it along with maltose/dme too in a mixture, just to save money.

Most beer yeast likes corn sugar (dextrose) second only to maltose. They can consume it without having to invert it. If you were to use table sugar instead (sucrose/fructose) then they have to produce invertase enzymes (yes that's a real thing) to invert the sugar and then eat the byproducts of this process - one of which is dextrose. It takes less energy and is faster for the yeast to eat straight up dextrose or a mixture of dextrose and maltose.

You probably want to add some nutrient if your using straight up dextrose, because wort has "other stuff" that yeast needs to reproduce - but lots of folks toss nutrients into their starters anyways.

mashani wrote:It makes sense to me. He may have been using it along with maltose/dme too in a mixture, just to save money.

Most beer yeast likes corn sugar (dextrose) second only to maltose. They can consume it without having to invert it. If you were to use table sugar instead (sucrose/fructose) then they have to produce invertase enzymes (yes that's a real thing) to invert the sugar and then eat the byproducts of this process - one of which is dextrose. It takes less energy and is faster for the yeast to eat straight up dextrose or a mixture of dextrose and maltose.

You probably want to add some nutrient if your using straight up dextrose, because wort has "other stuff" that yeast needs to reproduce - but lots of folks toss nutrients into their starters anyways.

Sounds logical and makes sense too, I should just ask Al about it the next time I see him and see what he says. He's recently opened a lab in the same building as a new local brewery in our area but he's still hand delivering his ECY yeast to Princeton Homebrew regularly. He's producing at least a dozen strains including several types of ale, lager, Brett and farmhouse all in the same lab so he's got a lot of little yeast mouths to feed and I'm sure he's figured out a way to keep costs down while improving quality.