How soon can I steal Yeast from my Conical?

So I just got my first Conical and brewed 10 gallons of imperial Porter Saturday. I used a 2-Liter starter from a stir plate of wyeast 1335. I'm considering doing an English Mild on Wednesday(tomorrow) and want to use the same yeast. My Porter was fermenting fairly well already on Sunday Morning, and last night was going pretty much full strength. Would enough yeast have fallen out of suspension by tonight or tomorrow that I can safely take some without affecting the porter in any negative way? I'm considering 2 options, pulling out a small amount tonight(Tuesday) and making a fresh starter and putting on the stir plate over night, or should I just give the yeast another full day in the conical and pull straight from that and add it right to the mild? Or should I just push back my mild for a week until fermentation is closer to being completely finished?

Subscribed just because I am curious to hear what people have to say. I don't have a conical, but my gut says you'd be better off waiting a few days if you can. I've read on a couple of different threads that the weaker and less healthy yeast cells will flocc first. This makes me think that anything you pull now will be a mix of trub and weaker yeast. I'd give it a few days until active fermentation is complete and more viable yeast begins to settle

I also don't have a conical but I would be tempted to pull the trub and some yeast now and wait a while longer for the better yeast to flocc out.

I don't have one yet, but some of the recommendations I've seen that make sense to me if you plan on harvesting yeast are three different dumps.

1st mini dump after everything has settled for 30-60 min to drop any trub/break material/hop junk.
2nd dump after a couple days into fermentation to discard the most flocculant and dead yeast.
3rd dump prior to racking to save the creamy yeast for another batch.

I don't know if that's the best method or not, but it's likely the first I'll try when I get a conical.

As a side question (and definitely not trying to thread jack) but what type of conicals do you guys have or are looking at? Stainless is likely out of my budget as I am looking at a combined mash/sparge/boil system like the Sabco or morebeer. I have been eying the plastic food grade conicals. Those seem to be pretty solid and would still offer the ability to harvest yeast.

I'm using a Blichmann 27 gallon, purely because I got a really good deal on it. So far I really like it, it seems really nice and I can bet I'm going to be buying another in the near future, it seems very well designed.

Does a fermenter that large overwhelm a 10 gal batch? I can see where blow off could be no issue at all. But what about headspace? Does it generate enough co2 so that oxygen is purged? An since we're talking about yeast harvesting, how does that work w/ a conical? It looks like u pull sediment from the bottom valve. But if u pull before racking, I assume the level of "clean" beer drops below the level of the top valve. How do you retrieve the beer in the cone later? Or do you just wait a few days and let additional yeast settle there?

winvarin said:

Does a fermenter that large overwhelm a 10 gal batch? I can see where blow off could be no issue at all. But what about headspace? Does it generate enough co2 so that oxygen is purged? An since we're talking about yeast harvesting, how does that work w/ a conical? It looks like u pull sediment from the bottom valve. But if u pull before racking, I assume the level of "clean" beer drops below the level of the top valve. How do you retrieve the beer in the cone later? Or do you just wait a few days and let additional yeast settle there?

Click to expand...

I would think it would be fine, as the brewhemoth is 22gal capacity and they say it's good for 5 - 15gal batches.

As for yeast harvesting & racking, I'd imagine there are multiple ways to skin that cat. Many of the conicals have or include a rotating racking arm. In that case I'd be inclined to harvest yeast, then use the racking arm to rack. I've also heard of some people dumping yeast/trub and then racking from the dump valve.

Let the beer ferment out. 1335 should go fast and floc tight. Dump a little bit of yeast and trub. Collect the middle creamy layer and pitch direct (that's the healthiest yeast), and discard the last bit of yeast (it's the least flocculant and most likely the most stressed yeast).

WVbrewer said:

Let the beer ferment out. 1335 should go fast and floc tight. Dump a little bit of yeast and trub. Collect the middle creamy layer and pitch direct (that's the healthiest yeast), and discard the last bit of yeast (it's the least flocculant and most likely the most stressed yeast).

Click to expand...

That was pretty much what I was going to do, still am going to do I guess. Things came up and I had to cancel tonight's brew, so I'm hoping to be able to squeeze it in maybe this weekend. That will work out better as far as the yeast goes anyway, fermentation has really slowed, so it should be pretty well finished by then.

thanks for the advice