Harvesting yeast from can - question

I have a question on harvesting yeast from cans. Typically I have a friend and his wife come over and we drink a 4-pack and I harvest the yeast from the 4 cans all at once. I'm on a schedule for brew day and don't have anyone available to help with consuming the beer, so I'm thinking of using a different technique.

I can probably drink two cans (8.2% DIPA) in a single session. So I could start the harvest with the dregs from those first two cans. Would it be OK to throw in the dregs from the next two cans over the next two days? Or would it be better to hold off harvesting and keep adding the dregs to a sanitized ball jar until I've collected them all, then make up my wort and pitch it all? Or just use two cans and be done with it?

are you brewing today? if so, you're going to want as much of that yeast as you can get, and adding some 24-48 hours in won't really get you anywhere (growth phase should be just about done at that point). even 4 cans of dregs seems like an underpitch to me.

if you have some time, why not drink one or two and make a starter? you don't need a fancy stir plate/flask setup, just some 1.030 wort in a super clean and sanitized mason jar would be fine. cover with foil and swirl it every time you walk by. pitch after 24h or crash it in the fridge or a day or two, then bring back up to pitching temp and decant, swirl, and pitch when ready.

is this mystery canned DIPA Heady Topper by any chance? if so, some searching on here will lead you to threads about harvesting and using the Conan yeast from it, and a pretty epic clone thread (although if you can buy it readily you're probably better off with that). cheers

You can do it but not that quickly. Also, maybe we can also help you increase your ability to kill more than two of those DIPAs in a "session".

As long as you're willing to be patient with it you only need one can. Give it 30ml at 1.03ish and give it a day. Give it 200 ml at 1.04 and another day and you could pitch it to 3 litres if you wanted.

SimonHucko said:

are you brewing today?

is this mystery canned DIPA Heady Topper by any chance?

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No, brew day is close to two weeks off. I will be stepping this up 3 times

Yes, the cans are Heady Topper and the batch will be a HT clone attempt. I have seen various postings and blogs on harvesting Conan, but they always harvest in one go. I've harvested before, and had great success using 4 cans. I'm just looking for opinions on my options since there's no way I can drink 4 Headys in one sitting.

Riot said:

As long as you're willing to be patient with it you only need one can. Give it 30ml at 1.03ish and give it a day. Give it 200 ml at 1.04 and another day and you could pitch it to 3 litres if you wanted.

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This is what I'm leaning towards, only using two cans, which I can drink in a single session. My last two harvests (HT and Bells Two Hearted), I started with 4 cans/bottles and pitched that to ~200 ml of ~1.025, stepped that up to ~900 ml of 1.030, then decanted that and pitched into 2L of 1.040. This worked great both times. I think 2 cans stepped up in this manner might work sufficiently well to pitch an adequate starter into my HT clone batch

ok I obviously misunderstood that you were propagating from cans, sorry. been spending too much time on the wild/sour forum where people pitch dregs directly from bottles.

you have the time and the know how, stepping up from 2 should be fine. obviously starting with fewer cells means additional growth, and sanitation becomes even more important. you can always add more dregs when you do your first step up too.