Yeast Slant Swap

I just wanted to post here my recent experience with swapping some yeasts with a fellow HBT'er. Some of you may have seen recently some discussion about starting a swap section/ thread/ etc. and then it fell off and not much has developed since then.

I ended up swapping some slants, 4 to be exact, with a fellow member and just wanted to tell everyone that it was great, and I wanted to share some of my experiences. The swap was with adrock43, and I wouldn't think twice to do it again with this guy!

First off it is obviously best to do this in cooler months and we had some issues with the slants melting, so make sure that your slants are sealed up tight before you pack them away. Also, shipping flat rate box is more expensive than just getting a box quoted with priority, unless you are swapping, maybe, 15 plus slants? We did 4 slants and it was about twice as much with a flat rate box than with a larger box.

If I think of anything else, i'll post here but this is a great idea, if you are not paranoid about things and can extend a bit of trust for some of your fellow brewers. I expanded my library by about 25 percent for the cost of 5 bucks of shipping or so, and of course my time.

Cheers

Melting slants should really only be an issue if you are using gelatin instead of Agar-Agar for your slants. This is one of the reasons I switched to Agar-Agar slants. I keep a decent collection of yeast (about 7-9 strains) and would be interested in doing this. Most of what I have is WLP stuff but my practices are quite sanitary and I have been doing this for about 10 years. I have never had any issues with fermentation or infection that I was able to attribute to my culturing. Plus, I live in NC which is pretty close to where you are so it would arrive quickly.

We were both using Agar, but decided to ship them when most of the north east had a record heatwave and black outs, so I'm assuming the 100 plus temps were the culprit. The second time was great though and all slants were intact. I am relatively new to this, been doing it about a year or so but had good results thus far and no infections/ sanitation issues either. I don't think I need any more slants currently, but was hoping to get some discussion about the possibilities going. In fact my library is probably too diverse at the moment ~ 14 or so different slants. I'm going to wait a bit and see if I can pare it down some to the ones I really use.

Anyone else?

I'd be interested to hear if anyone has some interesting yeasts in their library, besides the normal stuff from wyeast/whitelabs.

Is there much investment required to start yeast slanting?

Check the sticky up top, for a decent setup around 100 bucks, with a pressure cannerand some glassware from cynmar. But it can be donee with less. the money is the pressure cooker. The bigger you can get the better as it is a lot of work to do this and getting as much done at once helps.