Incremental feeding (also called staggered feeding) is the practice of feeding your yeast additional sugar mid-fermentation. It involves reserving a portion of the fermentable sugars on brew day and adding them to the wort after fermentation has reached high Kräusen.
Why would you ever want to do this? Isn’t creating one wort and adding yeast good enough? Most of the time, yes. If you pitch an appropriately sized, healthy culture of yeast into well-oxygenated wort and keep the temperature within the yeast’s optimal range, then there’s usually no need to depart from the standard protocol.
However, in a couple of situations, it might make sense to give the yeast only a portion of the sugars up front and withhold the remainder for a time partway into fermentation. The most common scenarios include the following:
- Your selected yeast strain benefits from such a regimen.
- You can’t build a large enough yeast population through standard propagation methods (starters).