Using a yeast starter and oxygenating wort can dramatically affect the quality of your homebrew. The homebrewers here at the beveragefactory.com think it is one of the most important factors in creating great homebrew.
What is a yeast starter and why is it important?
A yeast starter is a suspension of yeast, sugars, nutrients, and water for the purpose of growing yeast to an optimal cell health and count for pitching into your wort. Starters are important as under-pitching will cause the yeast to double (grow) more which makes for more vigorous fermentations that stresses the yeast population and creates higher levels of off flavor compounds. Under-pitching can also result in under attenuation.
Pitching at optimal rates will result in a healthy fermentation and expected beer flavors. A calculator to assist with determining starter details can be found at http://www.mrmalty.com/calc/calc.html
Our yeast starter kits are designed to give you the tools needed to create healthy happy yeast populations to pitch into your wort.