What is the downside to over pitching?

I see where people reuse the cake all the time. I like to at least split the left over yeast and wash at least once. Once it sits in the fridge for a while I always have a small level of creamy looking yeast and about 10 times of other stuff below that. I just pitched around 500ml of slurry minus the beer/water on top on to 5.5 gal of 1.029 wort. I expect it to go pretty well.

Is my only problem the fact that I don't have a blow off tube and am using an airlock?


-Stinky

This is one of the best threads ever on yeast cakes and over pitching:

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f163/why-not-pitch-your-yeast-cake-166221/

Ah yes. I remember that thread but back when I read it I was more of a newb and didn't understand all of it. (* I wonder why it didn't come up in my searches today! - I say make it a sticky)

But that is very helpful. Thanks. I'll continue reading that thread to see if I can get more info.

I guess my real question is how to measure. The small level of creamy white yeast seems so small that I wonder if it's enough. That's why I pitched so much. My other batches have gone fine with 200ml of the same stuff. I don't know why I wanted to pitch more. I guess I'm just always tweaking and can't leave well enough alone. After washing out the hops and stuff I still have lots of stuff which I'm hoping is good yeast. For my small beer I may aim for closer to the 200ml amount which I have done in the past. I wish I could take my harvested yeast from a batch and extract only the good clean yeast without the other stuff.

Any way that was very helpful. Thanks again.

Here is a picture of the thin white line I'm talking about.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f163/yeast-washing-fail-read-above-thread-after-washing-323081/

This should help. http://www.mrmalty.com/calc/calc.html Just use the repitching from slurry option. I've used it to roughly measure my pitching rates from washed yeast with good results. Overpitching will give your beer a boring yeast profile. IMO, that makes your beer dull. Just my opinion though.