Inoculating Plates and Slants
From German brewing and more
These instructions show how to inoculate a plate of malt agar with a yeast sample to grow single cell colonies. This technique allows you to "clean" a suspect sample of yeast by selecting only one or few yeast cells for further propagation.
What's needed
To steak yeast onto a plate you'll need:
- a flame source for sterilizing the inoculation needle
- an inoculation needle. A piece of wire works as well, but inoculation needles are cheap and you should pick one up when buying the petri dishes
- a sample of yeast. This could be an empty Wyeast smack pack, Whitle Labs vial, dregs from a bottle conditioned beer, an active fermentation, yeast sediment .... In this case I had an old White Labs vial into which I filled sterile wort to get the yeast fermenting again before taking a sample.
- an petri dish with malt agar that has been prepared in advance. (See [Making Plates Slants])
