Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Getting the most out of the brew day. (Making starter from trub)

When it comes to brewing I like saving money. I was making a batch of blonde ale, and I noticed how much dead space was at the bottom of the pot after siphoning off all the wort, the leftover trub mixed with wort.

I was thinking that it would be great to be able to extract more wort from the batch, especially since I would be brewing a bigger beer in a week or so. The beer I was brewing had an OG of 1.051, so what I did was add water to the pot, mixed it with the trub, then poured it into mason jars.


I ended up with about 3 mason jars from the 6 gallon batch that I brewed. I left the mason jars in the fridge overnight, and the next day wort had separated from the trub. The added water reduced the gravity only by about 0.006.

Then I poured them all out into a 4th mason Jar. I ended up adding a tad bit more water to each of them, about 2 oz more to each mason jar, then shook it up and repeated the process of leaving it in the fridge, to top off the jar.


At the end of the process I ended up with a full mason jar (3 cups/24oz), which saved me a bunch of DME. The other added benefit of this is that it does contain hops so it helps to preserve the starter.