Making yeast slants

In the interests of economy I've decided to try and make up some yeast slants.

First, I needed to make some agar up

Bring around 500ml of water to the boil

Add enough dried malt extract (DME) to produce a s.g. of around 1040-1045.

Add in 1/2 capsule of Servomyces yeast nutrient

Boil for 10 minutes.

 Filter out the hot break

Add 7gm of agar agar and boil for 2 minutes

Split into slant tubes, between 15ml and 25ml/tube

 Put the tubes into a pyrex jug inside a pressure cooker

When the vent starts steaming throw on the valve and leave under pressure for 10 minutes

 Leave to cool, release pressure and lay out tubes on a slant to produce a large surface area for yeast inoculation

Take your mother yeast colony - in the case White Labs Brettanomyces Bruxellensis Trois (WLP644) Belgian Ale Yeast (on the left, below), a slant and a sterile needle (here a single use tattoo needle, EO sterilised)

 Below is just an illustration of a slant tube, agar (that dropped out and is about to be disposed of) and the inoculation needle

 Five finished tubes, will keep in the fridge for up to 12 months. They can be used to make starters for more than 100L of ale. Should keep me quiet for a while...

Mutton dressed as ham

One of my customers was talking to me recently about an old NZ tradition of 'mutton ham'. This is taking a leg of mutton (a sheep that is more than 2 years old) and treating it as you would a ham. On looking into this there are a pile of recipes on the internet for this, so I decided to have a go.

Ingredients

1 leg of mutton
75gm brown sugar
4 tbs golden syrup
1 tbs ground ginger
1 tbs ground cloves
1 tbs allspice
1 tbs white pepper
300gm PVD salt

It starts as a more or less dry rub on the mutton, but as you turn it and re-apply the brine every 12 hours it becomes a wet brine and more and more liquid is drawn from the meat.

After 6 days wash the meat down, rub all over with malt vinegar and leave to hang for 24 hours to dry.

It can then be either smoked or boiled the next day. I'm off to Australia for the rest of the week, so mine will hand for a week and I'll smoke it next Sunday and boil it after that. It should last a month in the fridge.