EastCoast Ale Starter and new plates!

My EastCoast Ale starter is going strong!  I went from a 10 ml starter from a single colony to a 125 ml starter.  Yesterday I kicked it up to an 800 ml starter and it has really taken off.  I recently got a stirplate and this is my first chance to get to play with it.  I put both the 125 ml and the 800 ml starters onto the plate.  The 800 ml starter is happily spinning away.  I'm brewing my RedHead in 2 days so I think I should be in good shape.  I'm expecting that fermentation to take right off!

In other news.....I recently purchased some glass petri dishes!  Brand new at bio supply companies they can be kindof pricey but I found some on ebay at a great price.  I suspect they may not be as high of quality as I might purchase from FischerSci but I think they are going to do a great job for me.  My last batch of plates ended up with a lot of contamination.  Part of the problem was the hot and muggy weather we were having this summer and mold spores floating everywhere.  Since I poured my malt-agar into plastic plates I was only able to keep things sanitized and not sterilized.  With the new plates I mixed up the malt-agar solution and poured it into clean plates.  I then ran the poured plates through an autoclave at work.  For those of you without access to an autoclave a pressure cooker would work just fine.  So now I have a bunch of nice new sterile plates to work with.  My cultures are getting old and a few have picked up some contamination.  The nice thing about working with the plates is I can see contaminant colonies and pick up a nice healthy looking colony and re-isolate it on a new plate.

I made up a few slant tubes as well.  I figure plates work great for isolating colonies from a liquid culture but they do take up some room in the fridge, can become contaminated when opened, and can dry out.  Slant tubes address all of these problems.  Once you have a pure isolate they are a good way of storing the culture.  My Cry Havoc plate still looks in good shape and has some happy looking colonies.  I picked one up and inoculated a slant with it today, can't wait to see how it grows.