The beer kit comes with a dry yeast starter pack, but they tell me that using a live liquid yeast culture to brew your beer is much better. I skipped this step with my first batch, used the dry stuff, and it turned out pretty good. So maybe this is all unnecessary...but I guess there's only one way to find out! There are many varieties to choose from, so I went online and used their suggestions to purchase the yeast, which came to about $4.25.

This is what the yeast pack looked like right out of the box. If you don't plan on using it right away, it's a good idea to leave it in the refrigerator until you are ready.

After struggling to break the little nutrient bubble inside the pack, I let it sit in a warm spot by the stove for 24 hours. The temperature was around 75 to 80 degrees. A day later, it looked ready to burst!

To give the yeast a head start, first sterilize a pan, measuring spoons, and thermometer with bleach water. Bring 1 C. water to a boil. Add 1/4 C. dry malt extract (from the kit) and boil for 15 minutes. The mixture tends to boil over, so you have to watch it. Add 1/8 tsp. yeast nutrient to the pan and boil for 5 more minutes. After sitting in a cold water bath in the sink, the solution was about 80 degrees and ready for the yeast. Agitate the solution vigorously for a bit to oxygenate the water, then carefully cut the starter pack open and pour in the yeast solution. This is what it looked like the next day after sitting in the same warm spot by the stove for about 12 hours. By the way, the cap was VERY LOOSELY placed on the bottle. Otherwise, I might have been picking glass shrapnel out of the walls since the yeast releases carbon dioxide while it multiplies and feeds on the malt sugars. Some people use cotton soaked in vodka to plug the bottle mouth, but I figured that would take a lot of cotton and too much precious vodka for the large bottle I used!