Hydrating Yeast when Brewing Barley Wine

"Hi, I'm Mark Emiley on behalf of Expert Village. In this segment, we're going to show you how to prepare your dry yeast for inoculation into your wort. First, you're going to pour one cup of water into a nice Pyrex container. Next, you're going to put this into your microwave and turn it on until you get a nice rolling boil. Once it's come to a boil, you're going to want to take it out and then you're going to want to cover it with saran wrap. When you've got it covered, you're going to want to put it into your refrigerator and let it cool. You are aiming for it to get around a hundred degrees which will be just about warm on your fingers, but not hot at all. Our water for our yeast rehydration is now getting just about blood temperature which is where we want it. You can check this with a sterilized thermometer to make sure it's around one hundred degrees. If it's a little lower, you're still okay. Now that it's at the right temperature, we are going to add in the yeast. So we're going to take off the nice saran wrap covering which has been keeping it nice and sterile and then we are going to cover it back up. Now I'm going to take a sterilized fork which I used in my sanitization fluid and help break up the yeast a little to get it into the solution. You don't need to do too much of this, just enough to get it under the top of the water and it will be good. Now, take this back out, get it good and covered up again, and we're going to put this aside in our room temperature environment for about fifteen to thirty minutes as our wort cools."