chuckjaxfl

Recipes 

Early last year, I started reading about sterile water suspension and started putting up some small samples in these little vials:

http://www.discountvials.com/Threaded-Glass-Vials-s/22.htm

All of the instructions say that room temp storage is acceptable, but I kept mine in the little, otherwise useless, tray on the door of my little fridge anyways.

On 4/18/10, I put away some WLP028.
On 9/27/11, I streaked a plate.
On 9/29/11, my plate looked like this:


You can see that I really didn't streak the whole plate very well. I really didn't think it would take off after 17 months, so I just streaked one sloppy line, burned the loop once, then streaked across it once. I just wanted to confirm that the samples weren't viable before tossing them. I glad to be wrong!

I didn't get a picture of it today, but there were some more outlying isolated colonies to choose from, so I used a few of those to start a couple cc's of sterile wort.

I'm surprised this method gets as little chatter as it does!

theredben

Recipes 

I think the lack of chatter is due to the lack of cool tools and gizmos, and otherwise useless accessories. It just seems too simple!

chuckjaxfl

Recipes 

That's a shame.

I've been very pleased with every attempt using the sterile water technique. I've got a vial of 1450 that I think I'll resurrect next. I think I'll keep a few samples around for awhile, though. I'm curious to see how long these can be kept under "average guy" conditions, as opposed to -80 in a lab.

NEKvt

Recipes 

I'm interested in your process if you care to detail it a bit more. I can easily sterilize water, but how are you adding the yeast to solution? Are you just dipping a sterile loop into your fermenting beer and adding that to the sterile water? Or are you pulling a bunch of yeast from the bottom of a starter and adding that to the water? Basically, is your yeast to water ratio very dilute? It seems from what I've read, which is based on using this method for fungal spores, that a very dilute cell count is maintained in the sterile water.

chuckjaxfl

Recipes 

I streak a plate, then use a loop to carry 4-5 of the best looking colonies to the water. More is not better. I put just enough in that it appears slightly turbid when shaken and held up next to plain water.

I'm speculating, but I think pipetting from beer or a starter would defeat the purpose.

NEKvt

Recipes 

That makes more sense as far as making sure you have a single bug in the culture for sure. Don't know why pulling colonies off a plate didn't come to mind...