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Bottle Yeast. The Beginning of Yeast
Get a strong quart bottle, an ale or champagne bottle will do. Make some strong hop tea by boiling a large handful of hops in a quart of water, cool it and strain it into the bottle, squeezing the hops dry to get the full strength. The bottle must only be two-thirds full. Then put into the bottle, besides, two handfuls of ground malt and one handful of sugar. Shake up, cork and tie the cork down with twine, like ginger-pop. Set the bottle on a warm shelf in a corner of the kitchen where it will not be disturbed and will not be in danger of getting too warm in the heat of the day. Let it stand there from 44 to 48 hour, by which time it will be yeast on a small scale, ready to start fermentation in the stock itself.
This is not a bread recipe but a starter — a way of capturing and multiplying wild yeast in a bottle before packaged yeast was dependable. It works, but the vessel instructions are the part to change.
- Do not tie the cork downA sealed quart bottle of fermenting malt and sugar builds real pressure, and glass bottles have burst from less. Use a loosely set cork, a fermentation airlock, or a jar with a cloth cover secured by a rubber band so gas can escape.
- Ground maltThis means crushed malted barley, the same thing homebrew suppliers sell as crushed base malt. Diastatic malt powder from a baking supplier will also work; non-diastatic malt syrup will not, since the point is the enzymes and the wild yeast riding on the grain.
- HopsA large handful is roughly 1 oz of whole dried hops. They are not for flavour here — hop resins suppress lactic bacteria and give the yeast a clear field. Any bittering variety does the job.
- "Handfuls" and proportionThe measures are genuinely loose. Read it as enough hop tea to fill the quart bottle two-thirds full (a pint and a half or so), 4-6 oz crushed malt, and 2-3 oz sugar, with the bottle left a third empty for foam. Precision is not the operative variable; warmth and time are.
- "A warm shelf"The target is roughly 70-78F, steady. Cooler and it stalls, much warmer and the culture sours before the yeast takes hold.
- What success looks likeAfter 44-48 hours you want a foaming head, a bready-beery smell, and visible activity when shaken. A vinegary, cheesy or nail-polish smell means the wrong organisms won; discard and start again.
- "The stock"Apparently the larger ferment this bottle was pitched into: the bottle yeast is a seed culture rather than something used directly in a dough.
- ReliabilityWild capture is a lottery, and a modern packet of instant yeast or an established sourdough starter will do the same work with none of the uncertainty. Make this because the process interests you, not because you need leavening tonight.
Before compressed yeast was sold reliably by the cake, a baker's leavening was a standing problem of supply. Brewery barm was the usual source in towns with a brewery, and where it was scarce or inconsistent bakers propagated their own from a malt-and-hop wort — essentially a miniature brew whose purpose was the yeast rather than the beer. Jessup Whitehead, who wrote for the hotel and restaurant trade out of Chicago in the 1880s and 90s, was writing for cooks who might be a long way from a dependable supplier, which is why a book of pastry begins at the very bottom with how to get yeast at all. Commercial compressed yeast in America is generally traced to Charles Fleischmann's business in the 1860s and 70s, but it took decades to reach every kitchen, and instructions like this one persisted in trade manuals well after the packaged product existed.