Noob yeast washing question

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ilikeguns

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I brew a lot of IPAs and do a lot of dry hopping with pellet hops where I just pour it in to my fermenter bucket. Since I don't use hop bags in any parts of my brew process, i'm usually left with a decent amount of hops sludge in my fermenter after I rack.

So my question is can I still wash this yeast? I'm concerned that I won't be able to properly separate the hops from the yeast. Since I primarily brew IPAs, is this even a real concern?
 
You can still wash the yeast. You'll need to be sure to not cut any corners when doing it though. I would go through the entire process, fully, so that you don't muddy the flavors of one batch with what's left from a previous batch.

An alternative to washing yeast is to make starters, and reserve some of the slurry from a starter to step up and reserve it.
 
Thanks Golddiggle. Kegged a batch last night and washed my yeast. It took two passes but I think I got rid of the hop sludge/trub. The attached picture is about 10 minutes into the first wash.

Right now i have 3 pint mason jars in the fridge that are separating out now and I'll post a picture tonight/tomorrow with the result.

Depending on when brew day is going to be, I'm going to make a starter out of it and give it a go. It's going to be my first all grain batch so I may just start off with a smackpack/starter instead of this yeast so I don't introduce too many variables at once.

2012-11-18 23.03.52.jpg
 
I advise always making a starter, even with washed yeast. That will make sure you've captured viable yeast, and wakes them up before being pitched.
 
I advise always making a starter, even with washed yeast. That will make sure you've captured viable yeast, and wakes them up before being pitched.

Thanks again. A starter is definitely going to be part of the process. As i was saying earlier, I brew mainly high OG beers so all the calculators say to make some decent size starters. I'm in the process of trying to figure out how many yeast cells I have now so I can figure out how to properly step up my starter.

I need at least 257 billion yeast cells which I believe is roughly 100 ml of yeast. Once I see how last nights washing has settled out, I believe that I can get a baseline of how many cells I have and figure out the steps accordingly.
 
When pitching from a slury the calculators can be pretty far off in my experience. I'm working on trying to correlate days in the primary, days in the fridge, and washing, but have yet to see anything conclusive. The only thing I have figured out so far is that the viability for slurries can vary by a factor of ten pretty easily from what the calculators may say.

Here's some more information:
http://woodlandbrew.blogspot.com/2012/11/counting-cells.html

The starter calculators seem to be within a factor of two assuming you know how many cells you are starting with.

For me it seems the only way to know is to count the cells.
 
Thanks again. A starter is definitely going to be part of the process. As i was saying earlier, I brew mainly high OG beers so all the calculators say to make some decent size starters. I'm in the process of trying to figure out how many yeast cells I have now so I can figure out how to properly step up my starter.

I need at least 257 billion yeast cells which I believe is roughly 100 ml of yeast. Once I see how last nights washing has settled out, I believe that I can get a baseline of how many cells I have and figure out the steps accordingly.

If you have a decent idea of the yeast slurry concentration, I would use yeastcalc.com to figure out how to do the starter. IME, going with even a two step starter will produce far more yeast cells than if you did a single (significantly larger) starter. Especially if you also have a stirplate to use with this.
 
I gave up using yeast calc some time ago. For a 5 gallon batch I do a 1L starter from a harvested yeast sample. For a 10 gallon batch I'll do a 1L starter, cold crash, decant, step with another 1L starter and pitch at high krausen. The problem is that its nearly impossible to accurately determine your starting cell count without a microscope and a hemocytometer. FYI, I don't do lagers.
 
I gave up using yeast calc some time ago. For a 5 gallon batch I do a 1L starter from a harvested yeast sample. For a 10 gallon batch I'll do a 1L starter, cold crash, decant, step with another 1L starter and pitch at high krausen. The problem is that its nearly impossible to accurately determine your starting cell count without a microscope and a hemocytometer. FYI, I don't do lagers.

I haven't washed yeast in some time. I'm getting ready to freeze some that I reserved (need to do another starter step to get more yeast to use). The ONLY reason I'm doing this is because the yeast is [currently] not available. It's the Wyeast 1882-PC (Private Collection) strain. I do hope they offer it again early in the year, so that I can buy some and make a better/bigger yeast bank from it. :rockin:
 
so here is my 3 jars 24 hrs later... looks like yeast? But yeah.. I don't see how anyone can venture a guess about viability or active cell count with any amount of accuracy..

I think I'll just make a starter and see how it goes...

2012-11-19 21.03.09.jpg
 
Yeah you really don't know what you have from a slurry. I have used the Mr. Malty slurry calculator and the beer came out fine, but recently found it's estimations are way off. The "thick to thin" slider doesn't even cover the entire range of cell density of my slurries, and I would have called all of mine "thick" doing a count. Also the viability from havest can range anywhere from 30%-90% on the day of harvest. The good thing is that it stays fairly viable once it is in the fridge.

bottom line, assume your cell count could easily be off by a factor of four when entering numbers into the starter calculator. The easy way to get an estimate is to assume 100 billion cells per liter and don't bother with the calculators.
 
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