You need more culture tubes than anything else because they are the workhorses of an amateur brewery culture collection. Experience has taught me that the smallest number of culture tubes that a brewer should have is two dozen. A bank that contains more than a couple of cultures will be difficult to maintain if one is forced to prepare less than a dozen blank slants at a time, and one should keep two inoculated slants per culture.
To be completely honest with you, borosilicate glass Petri dishes are nice to have around for those times when you are out of disposable presterlized dishes, but I guarantee that you will eventually switch to using disposable presterilized dishes after the newness of the hobby wears off. At most, you will need half a dozen borosilicate glass Petri dishes.
If you are like me, you will probably pour half a dozen plates at a time, and end up throwing half away because you do not use them before they dry out. Your greatest plate usage will occur while establishing your bank because all of the cultures that are received in non-slant form will have to be plated for single colonies. I own twelve Corning 3160-100 Petri dishes (I purchased a pack new), and every poured plate that is currently in my blank media storage container was prepared using a disposable presterilized Petri dish. The difference in the amount of time that it takes to prepare plates in presterilized plastic dishes and glass dishes is like the difference between extract and all-grain time-wise.
You need at least one nichrome loop. They last a long time in an amateur brewery, but they are cheap enough that you can afford to own a backup.
You only need one alcohol lamp. You may or may not outgrow an alcohol lamp. While I own a couple of Bunsen burners, I still use a flint glass alcohol lamp most of the time due to its portability and much less intense flame. Some people are not patient enough to use an alcohol lamp. The loop has to be placed in the tip of the inner cone of the flame until it turns red hot. The flame on a Bunsen burner burns so much hotter that a loop turns red almost immediately after being placed in the inner cone, but it is also easier to burn oneself and burn one's house down with a propane-fired Bunsen burner. I burn regular denatured alcohol in my lamp. Denatured alcohol is found in the paint section of most hardware stores, including Home Depot and Lowes. An alcohol lamp will also burn 190 proof Everclear with a nice blue flame, but 190 proof Everclear is illegal in Maryland.
I purchased a 10-pack of Corning 1395-100 100ml media bottles. I believe that the Kimble-Chase number for this size media bottle is KC14395100. I prepare 8 media bottles at time because that is the limit of my 6L pressure cooker. I will take me around six months to work my way through that many media bottles, but I am not going crazy with cultures.
