Teas and microbes

Has anyone ever made a tea using brewers yeast. I have access to a brewery and thought there may be a chance I could use their yeast after the beer is done.

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Never made a tea using brewers yeast but I use a product from GH, florablend vegan mix which contains brewer yeast, I use it if I don’t want or have time to brew a tea but want to get those organics into my feeds.

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I have heard that some companies are using it in there teas. I just wonder how yeast could work in this scenario being that its anaerobic.

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If the yeast is not usable, then at the very least the spent grain may be of interest to your grow operation, @smokinokie.

I have done a lot of homebrewing and feed all the spent grain to the worms. The castings are an excellent component of a healthy rhisozomal ecosystem. I also use the castings to brew amazing compost teas. Everything from our cannabis crops to our citrus trees and ornamental flowers love the rich blend of humic acids and abundant microbes.

I would be interested to learn more about using brewers yeast as part of a compost tea recipe. Have any @growopowners or @mastergrowers or @GrowOpEmployees every used brewers yeast to make teas?

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I have not used it in any tea but I have been waiting to try to use Malted Barley and blend it into a soil mix or use as a top dressing.

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Found a couple nutrient analyses of spent Brewers’ yeast (see below). Looks like it’s around 8-1-1 (NPK) with around 2.5% soluble N and variable mineral content “depending on the stage of fermentation/maturation at which it is removed and the number of times it is reused”
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327679903_Nutritional_Value_of_Spent_Brewers’_Yeast_Saccharomyces_cerevisiae_A_Potential_Replacement_for_Soya_Bean_in_Poultry_Feed_Formulation

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jib.229

Not sure if spent yeast would be particularly useful in making activated compost tea (ACT) with its low content of residual reducing sugars (1% by weight). In contrast, molasses is composed of 30-50% reducing sugar by weight. So you would need a LOT more spent yeast than molasses for use as a feedstock for ACTs.

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Great to see you @AmericanWeedwolf! Thanks for this valuable information and link.

I agree with your synopsis on molasses: definitely a more suitable source for brewing teas.

How often do you use molasses, @AmericanWeedwolf?

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If you brew a tea with it, microscope :microscope: it, tell us what your see or learned

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@Growernick to be honest, we don’t spend much time making teas. I’ve used them in the past but found them annoying with automated watering systems, as they clogged up drip emitters or filters constantly. The farm I currently work at used them extensively when I came on, so I set up a formal study comparing two liquid nutrient delivery systems - one organic and one synthetic - with the tea system and found no significant differences in yield or Cannabinoid content. The one thing we did find that was different was that both the organic and tea systems had significantly higher levels of terpenes then the synthetic system, but there was no difference between plants grown with the organic and tea systems. Since making tea requires a lot of extra supplies and labor costs (both brewing and filtering the tea and unclogging drip lines) compared with the other systems, we abandoned the tea all together, which saved over $2000 in labor costs per 4000 sq ft grow cycle.

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