Aussiedistiller, Home Distilling, Moonshine, Home Brew

Does anyone here have any suggestions on ways to make Lowans bread yeast consume sugar faster?

I thought Lowans worked pretty quick without trying to make it work any quicker.

Maybe try keep the ferment at a warm constant temp (28-30 degrees) it may work a bit faster but if you stress the yeast out by getting it too hot you may start getting some off flavours that carry through to your final product.

I rehydrate when i want it to ho faster so i donr kill half the yeast. try boiling the ingredients with citric to to invert sugar faster. have a look at teddysads low cost turbo alternative :handgestures-thumbupleft:

hydrate the yeast. warmer ferment temperature. adequate nutrients. optimum ph.
its one of the quicker yeasts as it is.

I use Lowans in my 100L TPW's and with a aquarium heater at 28 it is done well within a week

hoochlover wrote:Does anyone here have any suggestions on ways to make Lowans bread yeast consume sugar faster?

How long does it take for you now?
What size fermenter and what wash?
What is the ambient temp. or are you using a heating pad/blanket?
What % are you making your wash?

dogbreath vodka wrote:

hoochlover wrote:Does anyone here have any suggestions on ways to make Lowans bread yeast consume sugar faster?

How long does it take for you now?
What size fermenter and what wash?
What is the ambient temp. or are you using a heating pad/blanket?
What % are you making your wash?

:text-+1:
You could always go to turbo shite for a faster ferment
:teasing-tease: :laughing-rolling: 8-}

I've been running some tests on the yeast, 12 so far in batches of 4 with 400ml of reverse osmosis water and one tablespoon of yeast (yes I know it's a lot for that volume) pitched and 28g of sugar. When I find some more time I'll try more combinations of nutrients, sugar types, ph, temp and pitching rates

The lowans bread yeast seems pretty amazing because I can get a full ~4% fermentation in under 5 hours at 30 degrees with just the small addition of magnesium sulphate (epsom salts). With just water + yeast + sugar it takes over 12 hours which is surprising to me since I pitch so much yeast I thought the yeast needing nutrients would be lowered. I've just been playing around with ratios of magnesium sulphate and citric acid at the moment, but I find it hard to accurately measure the end time for the fermentation and checking it every 30 minutes is annoying. Does anyone have any ideas for measuring yeast activity and recording it? I'd like to somehow measure the CO2 being produced and map it to the computer somehow. I've definitely seen different performances at different times based on the ratios and measuring that seems necessary. I've come up with some ideas for a device but building the right thing for it is hard. Maybe I'm overlooking something simple others have used.

I found some patents by a chinese company which produces the same strain of yeast, Angel Yeast. They also did some tests measuring certain yeast nutrients and come up with their own ratio of yeast extract, acid protease and magnesium sulphate which boosted their ethanol results and time in fermentation. I want to further examine some other things that they didn't like pitching rates and ending up with a cleaner product rather than a high ABV.

I'm still kinda blown away by getting a complete fermentation of nearly 4% in under 5 hours though. My ~14% washes on the same stuff take two weeks. If the result is repeatable in larger containers then I think I'll probably start running 5-6% washes in a single day than waiting 2 weeks, it's more economical for time at the waste of water and labor I guess.

Another interesting thing to note is the addition of magnesium sulphate seems to reduce the krausen/foaming stage significantly. When I was watching it on the first run even though the magnesium sulphate solutions started bubbling sooner the ones without it looked way more active in regards to foaming. But the end result is they get their gravity to 1.0 quicker so not sure what exactly that means in regards to reduced foaming. Hope that can help someone.

From your 1st post i thought you were being impatient.
But obviously you are alot more serious about it than i thought. :angry-banghead:
Good on you mate :handgestures-thumbupleft:
I look forward to your conclusions and experiments :D

rumdidlydum wrote:From your 1st post i thought you were being impatient.
But obviously you are alot more serious about it than i thought. :angry-banghead:
Good on you mate :handgestures-thumbupleft:
I look forward to your conclusions and experiments :D

:text-+1:

rumdidlydum wrote:From your 1st post i thought you were being impatient.
But obviously you are alot more serious about it than i thought. :angry-banghead:
Good on you mate :handgestures-thumbupleft:
I look forward to your conclusions and experiments :D

:text-+1: this forum needs a Facebook style "like" button!

maddogpearse wrote:

rumdidlydum wrote:From your 1st post i thought you were being impatient.
But obviously you are alot more serious about it than i thought. :angry-banghead:
Good on you mate :handgestures-thumbupleft:
I look forward to your conclusions and experiments :D

:text-+1: this forum needs a Facebook style "like" button!

You just used it 8-} :laughing-rolling:

hoochlover wrote:The lowans bread yeast seems pretty amazing because I can get a full ~4% fermentation in under 5 hours at 30 degrees with just the small addition of magnesium sulphate (epsom salts). With just water + yeast + sugar it takes over 12 hours which is surprising to me since I pitch so much yeast I thought the yeast needing nutrients would be lowered

not sure what you mean here... but if you don't re-hydrate then you may kill half the yeast and the dead yeast will be nutrient for the rest, protein i think but i cant be sure

Aerate the wort well, olive oil*, epsons for magnesium, some calcium carbonate or calcium sulfate (pH up or down as needed) to get the calcium up to 100ppm, DAP, pitch a big starter, and sit it on 30-32c. Just make sure you have plenty of space for the krauzen.


*olive oil is just dip a toothpick in some olive oil and swirl it around in the wort. (once per 25L)

How are you controlling the other element in the process ?
The temperature

P3T3rPan wrote:How are you controlling the other element in the process ?
The temperature

I have 4 glass bottles submersed in a bucket of water, that bucket has a temp controlled heat belt wrapped around it. Where I am there is no problem with the cooling side of things, ambient temp where I do it is about 18C. And I have a digital probe in the water which stays at 30 every time I have seen it. I make the bucket temp about 45C first, submerse the washes in it until it cools to 30C trying to make sure the temperatures inside the bottle are roughly 30C too, then pitch the yeast. It looks very macgyverish but it seems to work.

I would be doing more tests at the moment but I feel like I'm not capturing enough data to make it really worthwhile, and the data i am capturing is laborious to do. Some kind of automated logging system would be nice because sometimes I have to sleep and a couple of the tests haven't finished like the ones without supplements. Whether counting bubbles or amount of CO2 produced would be good. I found some cheap switch counters online which you could rig to count bubbles if you could design some device which closes a circuit on a bubble. I kinda got one working with a ball check valve design, but since it's custom making it 4 times all the same is hard. And then you'd need to make sure each bubble was the same size on each test (which seems harder to do than it appears).

The chinese guys measured the weight of their samples every 24 hours and calculated how much was lost to CO2 that way. But on a small scale like I'm doing my ~1g accurate scales aren't good enough to rely on.

WTDist wrote:

hoochlover wrote:The lowans bread yeast seems pretty amazing because I can get a full ~4% fermentation in under 5 hours at 30 degrees with just the small addition of magnesium sulphate (epsom salts). With just water + yeast + sugar it takes over 12 hours which is surprising to me since I pitch so much yeast I thought the yeast needing nutrients would be lowered

not sure what you mean here... but if you don't re-hydrate then you may kill half the yeast and the dead yeast will be nutrient for the rest, protein i think but i cant be sure

I don't know if that's proven that not rehydrating kills half the yeast in all cases, it sounds like one of those homebrew mantales. But anyhow with my current tests only using small amounts of sugar it wouldn't be a big problem. If you're doing a 20% wash and don't rehydrate then yeah, maybe a large percentage will die off. If you check the chinese patent they actually show some sugar and alcohol concentrations that affect the yeast population. It's actually pretty high before 50% seems to be killed off from memory, and I don't know if rehydrating would have any affect on that at all. Maybe it does, someone should test it. :)

Dried yeast like what we use is actually dead yeast cells surrounding live yeast cells. So there is actually already dead yeast matter in the dried yeast, probably somewhere from 50 to 200% of the mass of the live yeast.

well done. Carry on

Does anyone have any suggestions about the lack of foaming due to magnesium sulphate? It seems strange to me. I know the stuff we use called "Epsom salts" is the hydrated form, so it has extra water but it's miniscule in the scheme of things. Perhaps the magnesium being available in the solution stops the yeast needing to break down other matter to obtain it and causing less foaming? Or does it allow the yeast to group together more instead of separating from each other? Just throwing ideas out there in case someone with more clue knows.

For neutral spirits I'm also wondering if there is any need with dried yeast to supplement extra nitrogen since there must be a high amount of already dead yeast matter in the dried yeast itself. So if you pitch enough dried yeast they'll have enough nitrogen and likely trace elements too. With neutral spirits you can just use as much yeast as you want to reduce the reproduction phase and keep the temp in the ~30-35C range to push it through quickly. It is that phase which introduces the most esters/oils. I'm trying to investigate exactly how much yeast is best for pitching to nearly completely avoid that phase and speed up fermentation as you wouldn't want to use more yeast than is necessary.

For people making beer/wine/whiskey/etc these esters are important so over pitching would hurt the final products taste and hence you definitely need nitrogen and trace elements if you're doing those. Anyone who has made homebrew beer probably knows a beer that tastes "flat", which is due to lack of ester build up commonly caused by overpitching yeast or too high temperature. You don't want to allow the yeast to quickly get out of that phase which reduces the "Taste" that so many people desire, and I guess the time needed for those esters depends on the type of brew you are making.

But I'm using bakers yeast for neutrals and all my tests are about making the cleanest neutral in the quickest fashion so I'm sure much of what I write won't apply to many people here.

I was under the impression the reproduction phase will continue until all oxygen is used up :-B