how to extract barm from beer for baking

Hi sasi,

The Fresh Loafer Pinpastry may be able to help you with this as he runs a bakery in the UK that uses ale barm as the leaven.

Here is a link to a comment by pinpastry on a thread about barm:

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/12978/dan-lepard039s-barm-bread-100-sourdough#comment-85521

and here is a link to the Pinpastry website

http://www.pinpastry.co.uk/

Hope that helps,

Regards,

Gary

The simplest way is to ask your friend to give you the sediment from the secondary ferment. The secondary yeast has proven itself to be fairly hardy. If he's making cold lagered beer, the yeasty sediment will also be cold hardy.  If he's making simple ales, then from the first ferment. Using the foam requires timing and knowledge, as the there is often oxidation damage to some portion of the yeast do to exposure.

If he's a real friend, he'll give you plenty of beer so you can save the sediment from the bottles. <%-}

cheers,

gary

I agree, I use beer yeast all the time! my blog: breadnbeer.com  I take it out of the secondary ferment when the beer gets bottled, my husband throws the barm into a little jar and I put it in the fridge. I've been using some for 6 months now! Actually, my latest blog sorta explains that some beer yeast takes longer than others, so beware! 3 out of 6 different beer yeasts bubbled like crazy and the other 3 took much longer to bubble. Also, I make a starter with the beer yeast because this makes it faster to use, water+flour+beer yeast and wait until it bubbles (use the float test), then add to bread mix. Some of them really pop only after 2 overnights in the fridge.. anyways, if you're interested, please visit my blog! :)