Does anybody actually try to make beer with their starters?a

I had a friend tell me how much fun he was having making one gallon batches. He had some good points, but my brew time needs to be dedicated to keeping things in the pipeline of the keg system. Later that evening I got home and swirled my growler to keep my yeast starter going and that's when it hit me. I am brewing 1/2 gallon batches all the time, but I dump them out.

So somebody must be doing this. A really basic 1-gallon house recipe, just DME, maybe a steeping grain, and a couple hops additions, maybe even a short boil?? OG: ~1.040 Then pitch your liquid yeast. Give it 1 week, you will have your yeast for the real batch. The starter beer you then secondary in growlers or straight to bottle in 22's. I can't imagine getting something that I could not drink a gallon of. And its a great way to learn about different yeast. I know people just use the yeast cake from the previous batch all the time, but this method seems different in its intent.

The arguments I see against it are: "You will have some trub in your starter to worry about, and I can make a starter in 15 minutes, but with a few more moving parts this will take an hour on the frontend and more time for bottling, keeping clean, etc." Am I missing something else or are a bunch of people about to tell me they do this all the time, in fact, there is a sticky on it?

I did that for my 3rd batch ever, it was a starter for my first Belgian tripel. I hopped it to 20 IBU, boiled for 45 minutes, fermented for a week, and bottled. I got maybe 8 beers out of it and they were pretty decent after sitting in the bottle for 4 or 5 weeks.

I haven't done it since (around 50 batches total) for a few reasons. First and foremost is sanitation. If you can avoid sticking racking canes, taking gravity readings, etc, you stand to to have less chance for infections. Second, is time. If I'm going to take a 20 minute process of making a starter into a 60-70 minute process, I might as well be making a bigger batch of beer. Not to mention the time involved to bottle 8 bottles of beer. Lastly, if you are going to wait a week for fermentation to be complete, your yeast is sitting in alcohol and using up some of its reserves. Any less and you couldn't bottle, any more and you risk further yeast degredation.

On the positive, you can experiment with this smaller batch and not have much money invested.

I do this after joint brew sessions with my buddies. We'll draw off the remaining second (or third) runnings from our mashtuns, then combine them into a larger container. Usually get somewhere about 1.5 gallons or so of 1.030-1.035 wort. Use that to make a 1 gallon mild, bottle it up after 10 days and reserve that yeast cake for pitching into our next (bigger) batch. From the small batch, I can usually get 8-9 12s or 4-5 22s, which I split among us.