Homebrew Beer Blog

My big Christmas present this year was a 22 qt pressure canner. I’m pretty excited about it, which is kind of weird.

A pressure cooker is a great brewing tool. I’ve got a bunch of Nalgene bottles (not the clear colored water bottles, the real polypropylene ones) that I use for yeast storage. I run these through the pressure cooker to sterilize. Overkill? Maybe, but they’re clean and sterile and I can do a half dozen or so pretty quick. I also use it to do a deep clean on all brewing tools that can take it. Basically anything stainless, rubber, glass, and silicone. I think this is a good idea once in a while to kill anything that might be hiding from my regular cleaning.

The biggest use though is to can starter wort. In the winter I brew up a couple batches of extract beer and then can them into 1 quart starters. Last year, I did a bunch of 1.035 wort, but this year I’m planning to do 1.070 wort, and then dilute it with canned water. For me two of those jars make about a 1.5 liter starter, and that’s about my typical stir-plate starter. So this should save me some work. Last year I canned about 48 quarts, and I’ve got probably 12 or so left. This year I plan to just do 24 quarts, or about a 6 gallon batch, then 12 of water. I can then just do a batch of water whenever. The water is also handy for rinsing yeast slurries.

I had a smaller pressure cooker. The rubber seal died though, and was out of commission for most of this year. I’ve been too lazy to find a replacement. When Christmas time came around and Kellie wanted to know what I wanted for Christmas, this came to mind. With the pressure cooker, I could barely fit 3 jars in there, with this one I should get 7. It should be less work, but probably not all that much time savings.

I plan to make up this year’s batch of starters in February or so, when cabin fever and basketball tournaments sets in.