Making Plates and Slants

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Before you can culture yeast, you need to create sterile media (slants, plates, starter volumes, glycol solutions ...) that can then be used to store or propagate yeast.

What is needed

Plates needed.jpg

Yeast culturing at home does actually not require a lot of specialized equipment. Here is a list of what is needed:

Hardware

pressure canner

When working with very small amounts of yeasts sanitation will not be sufficient anymore. Sterilization, which means complete elimination of all living organisms, including their sprores, is needed. But this cannot be done by chemical means or boiling at atmospheric pressure. Microbilology labs are using autoclaves to sterilize their vessels, tools and media. An autoclave uses pressurized steam to achieve temperatures high enough for sterilization. Though most home brewers do not have access to autoclaves, the function of an autoclave can easily be achieved with a pressure canner. Not only is a pressure canner much cheaper than an autoclave, it also has its uses in the kitchen and can be used to can starter wort.

When buying a pressure canner, look for a model that works at at least 15 psi. This will produce a temperature high enough for sterilization.

vials

Vials are needed for making slant cultures. Look for ones that are autoclavable. There are various shapes available. A post in a forum pointed me to this source Cynmar. These vials are great for slants and small volumes of culture wort. Another great advantage to slant tubes with rounded bottom (Morebeer) is that they can stand on their own.

petri dishes

If you want to work with single cell cultures or purify a yeast culture, you will need petri dishes. Get the glass ones, which can be cleaned and reused. I use the 75 mm ones from Cynmar. They are large enough to streak out yeast cultures and still fairly cheap.

baby food jars

The glass baby food jars can be used to hold agar cultures or small amounts of starter wort. Now that I have enough vials and plates I don't need them for agar cultures anymore, but still used them to keep sterile wort for the 2nd stage of propagation.


Software