Will a day or two matter much?

I picked up a growler of Dead Guy Ale and a bottle of Rochefort that I plan on drinking tonight and want to harvest the yeast but won't have a chance to do that until either tomorrow night or saturday morning. Can I just re-cap both bottles and stick them in the fridge for a day or two?

I'm not sure if that would be a problem or not - you're trying to be as sanitary as possible when culturing from a bottle b/c of the small amount of yeast and their potential low viability.
But either way make sure your starter is very small initially. The first time I tried to culture Roch was in ~500mL starter and that is tooo big - didn't work. Start small and work up -you probably already knew that. Good luck.

You never want to exceed 5 times the volume of the voulme you are culturing. So if you get 10ml, use a starter of around 25-50ml, after 8 hours go to 100ml, etc.

I'm not looking to make a starter out of them yet, just want to harvest the yeast. So my main concern is if I need to transfer the small amount of yeast from the bottles into a smaller sanitized vessel tonight or if I can just store it in the beer bottles for a day or two in the fridge before transferring it for longer cold storage

A day or two will probably work, but I would get to it as soon as possible. What media are you planning to use to store the yeast?

Iordz said:

What media are you planning to use to store the yeast?

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My roommate is a glassblower for a scientific glass company, he made me a bunch of small glass jars with airtight seals

IMHO, I would not store the yeast from the bottles without first making a small starter with it to help increase its viability. If it's already quite weak, you're probably not helping it any by leaving it in near-empty bottles for a while and then transferring it around, without giving it any food to let it build up its strength again.

Funkenjäger said:

IMHO, I would not store the yeast from the bottles without first making a small starter with it to help increase its viability. If it's already quite weak, you're probably not helping it any by leaving it in near-empty bottles for a while and then transferring it around, without giving it any food to let it build up its strength again.

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I've got to second this; I'm not sure how successfully you can culture from a bottle without making some kind of small starter.

so these two beers were not filtered at all, right?
and the growlers were sanitized before adding the beer...you're 100% certain?

You're better off posting around to see who has the Pacman yeast still and see if you can't get them to send you some.