stonebrewer

Recipes 

+1 Awesome advice. I have been washing yeast for a year or more now following Bernie's original guide and tweaking based on posts here and my own thoughts/experience. I get tons of good yeast now, most of my fermentations start in less than 4 hours (based on CO2 evidence...I am sure it started sooner as it takes time for CO2 to build up and start bubbling in my bucket). Definitely do a starter! You can also rinse the yeast over and over and over to get rid of the trub, though in the beginning I just used something that looked similar to your pix and it worked great and made awesome beer. As the saying goes, relax...

Cheers!

Beer-lord

Recipes 

My second try with the same yeast, 001, was bubbling away in 6 hours. It was actually a bigger starter that made the difference.

My only challenge now is to find enough space to keep my yeast.

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stonebrewer

Recipes 

I hear ya! I dedicated a dorm size fridge for yeast and hops and the yeast took over. Eventually I bought the 4 oz jelly jars and started washing all the pints and quarts and downsizing them to the 4 oz jars. Now all my yeast fits in the door and I have lots of room for hops.

Brewitt

Recipes 

Once your yeast settle out you can just leave enough liquid in to make a slurry and then transfer them to old White Labs tubes or get new ones from Amazon or other sources. They are sometimes called baby soda bottles. You can store a lot of those in a small space. They are easy to sanitize.

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"Here's to brewers yeast, that humblest of all beasts
Producing carbon gas reducing acetaldehyde
But my friends that isn't all -- it makes ethyl alcohol
That is what the yeast excretes and that's what we imbibe."
Adam Cole (aka cadamole) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6dzUOYTQtQ)

Interested in Freezing Yeast for later use in brewing?
See my article:

freezing-yeast

BlackPriest

Recipes 

Hi folks,

My apologies for asking if it's already been asked 100 times, I read the first 7 pages and didn't find the answer.

Pretty simple question, I did this yesterday and ended up with about 1/2 - 3/4 inch of nice yeast on the bottom of 3 jars. My question is do I now have yeast for 3 different batches, or are you suppose to put all the yeast from all the jars into the starter for one batch? Assume this will be different depending on how much yeast you get after washing, but what is the standard, all into one, or good for separate batches.

Thanks guys, great instructions, it was super easy to do.

zeg

Recipes 

It depends on how many yeast cells you caught and how many you need. The general rule is that a mL of dense yeast solids has 4.5 billion cells in it. Figure that you have probably about 15% trub even if you washed well, and your compacted slurry is probably not completely densely packed, and the viability won't be 100%. You'll have to guess some numbers there, then multiply the fraction by the volume of slurry you've got.

Enter those into your favorite yeast calculator (treat it as liquid yeast and adjust the viability/pitch volumes to match the number of cells you think you have) and see how much of a starter you need. You can use more starter volume or multiple steps to get by with a single jar worth, or you can pitch more than one jar and reduce the growth factor you need.

On a recent lager, I came up with a number of about 15 billion cells per washed pint (this might have been for one jar, I don't recall exactly, but they didn't end up with much settled slurry). For my fairly high-gravity lager, I needed a couple gallon-sized steps up even starting with two washed jars. Using yeastcalc, if you had a typical-gravity ale, you'd probably need a couple stage starter to get the proper pitch rate unless you have a much better harvest rate than I did.

Others may have advice based on more experience. I've only done this once, and it seems to have worked. But I don't know for sure whether my pitch rate was correct (though the lager DID take off in < 12 hours).

BlackPriest

Recipes 

Oh, I see. I haven't used a yeast calculator yet so I'll have to play around with that and see what I come up with. Or maybe I'll just pitch the whole lot and see what happens! Thanks for the reply, off to play with yet another thing I had no idea I had to know lol.

MMJfan

Recipes 

I've only washed yeast once so far but I'm planning on washing yeast from a batch of NB's Brickwarmer tonight. The question I have is, the recipe for the Brickwarmer calls for steeping orange peels during the boil. I removed them when I racked the wort into my fermenting bucket, but I was wondering if, after washing the yeast, would there still be much of a citruis flavor? I also brew a Great Lakes Christmas ale clone that uses the same yeast and was planning on re-using the washed yeast from the Brickwarmer to brew my Christmas ale clone but I don't want to if it will be too citruisy tasting...

MMJfan

Recipes 

LOL! My wife was telling her co-teachers about what a mad scientist I was turning into with all of these mason jars of washed yeast I was making. First of all, I've only washed one batch of yeast and have only 4 mason jars.

So anyway, we are having her school's Christmas party at our house last weekend and everyone wanted to know where all of the mason jars were. I had to disappoint them to tell them there were only four in our basement fridge but assured them that number would be growing soon!

mtnagel

Recipes 

Let's say I don't have enough time or desire to wash the yeast on he same day as transferring/bottling the beer, but can the following day. Would I be better off just covering back my primary bucket after transferring the beer off or should I transfer the trub to a glass jar and then store in the fridge overnight?

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