sugar, conditioning vs. starter?

I'm a very new homebrewer and have recently been learning about making a yeast starter. It occurs to me that it is normally recommended that corn sugar or even table sugar are recommended for bottle conditioning but DME is always recommended for a yeast starter. Why is that, it's the same yeast?

Sugar has no nutrients.  Wort does.  You should check out John Palmer's book How to Brew.  There is a electronic version on line for free - just google it.  He has a section on yeast and what it needs from starter to pitching to fermenting and bottling.

Bottle Condition == Carbonate the BEER the bottle.  Not building healthy yeast cells to ferment the WORT. 

Starter == building healthy yeast cells to ferment the WORT and make beer. 

DME == Dried Malt Extract.  This has everything yeast need to grow stong and healthy and turn wort into beer.  The sugars are complex and the yeast work long and hard becoming big and strong and rather sexy.

Sugar == Sucrose.  Sucrose is junkfood to yeast that makes them fat and lazy.  They are most notably bad for making beer and definitely not sexy.

AHA! I knew there was a very good reason out there! Thanks for clearing that up!

One more question then, why not just use DME for both a yeast starter and for bottle conditioning? Is there a reason not to feed your conditioning yeast the nutrients in DME?

Some people do.  But DME has only 80% of the sugar that pure sugar has and doesn't generate as much C02 as sugar so you need more of it.  Also, DME will generate more protein in the bottom of your bottle.

Johnnyv42 said:

One more question then, why not just use DME for both a yeast starter and for bottle conditioning? Is there a reason not to feed your conditioning yeast the nutrients in DME?

Click to expand...

That's what I do. I keep a large air-tight container of DME on hand. That way I only have to keep one ingredient around the house and I can use it for starters or bottling. I've never had any issues with using DME for bottling.

Just my personal choice.

Scott

Ive heard DME gives you a tighter bubble grouping and the bubbles are smaller so your head retention is effected in a good way. I just changed from corn sugar to DME recently and IMO the beers are turning out better. You just need a little more of it to achieve the same volume of carbonation.