Chris White joins me this week to discuss how White Labs produces yeast for commercial brewers and home brewing. We discuss everything from his yeast bank to production and packaging.
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Topics in This Week’s Episode (53:36)
- This week I’m pleased to have Dr Chris White, President and founder of White Labs as my guest. White labs is one of the largest producers of brewing yeast worldwide, and Chris oversees operations at two locations in the US and one in Europe.
- We start with a brief discussion of the COVID-19 virus and how it has impacted commercial brewing and Chris’ yeast production.
- Chris starts by explaining the white lab yeast bank which is stored at cryogenic temperatures to assure there is no change to the core yeast cells.
- We talk about how cells drawn from the yeast bank are grown in the laboratory up to useful sizes and also how purity is maintained along the way.
- Chris explains how they use 10x the volume of sterilized wort every two days to increase each generation by approximately 5-6x until they reach a reasonable starter size.
- We talk a bit about his yeast production equipment which at one time was stainless steel but now uses a polymer film much like that used in the pharmacy industry.
- Chris discusses how low gravity wort is used to grow yeast, and also how his wort is sterilized in an autoclave to assure purity.
- We talk about the critical importance of yeast packaging as well as some of the advantages of White labs pure pitch packaging.
- Chris explains how he harvests and concentrates yeast for packaging as well as the difficult challenge of separating the trub.
- We discuss what the commercial packaging looks like compared to the smaller homebrew packets. Apparently the 2 liter packs are the most popular commercial size.
- Chris gives us his closing thoughts on producing yeast.
Sponsors
- Thank you to our sponsor Craft Beer and Brewing Magazine for sponsoring this episode. I encourage you to subscribe to their great magazine!
- And also Anvil Brewing Equipment. Anvil is a new line of kettles, burners and accessories from John Blichmann at Blichmann Engineering. They make top quality brewing equipment built to last a lifetime.
- Also check out BeerSmith, BeerSmith Mobile software and the new DVDs John Palmer and I filmed – How to Brew with Malt Extract and How to Brew All Grain are available now. You can subscribe to the BeerSmith newsletter for free to get some great articles on home brewing.
Thanks to Chris White for appearing on the show and also to you for listening!
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