Splitting yeast starter to save

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juggabrew

juggabrew
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Hey I want to start reusing my yeast and was thinking of just buying a vial/pack, making a starter then splitting it. This seems like it would work great rather then saving my yeast cake which sounds like that works as well. But if i do not plan on brewing for a while I could just save these for future use it would be like buying a new pack each time. any thoughts as theres not much on this
 
This is an established, and considered the easiest by proponents, way to save yeast. The part I'm not so sure about is how long you want to save it - 1 week, 1 month, etc. makes a difference in how you store it. I believe there are a thread or three that go into this in detail - I believe glycerol is used and the yeast can be frozen.

An additional benefit to this method is that you do not age the yeast a generation - meaning you start with a generation X yeast you get two copies of generation X, in yeast washing you get a generation +1 and all of the corresponding good/bad (mostly) mutations.
 
I do it all the time.

Sometimes I make a starter larger than needed, other times I just take half from the first step and then step up the remainder.

When the starter is finished, I swirl it around to get the yeast into suspension, and take off about 1.5 pints. I cold-crash this and then pour off a pint, leaving about 7 ozs with all the yeast. This gets poured into a sanitized 8 ozs mason jar and stored in the fridge. Sometimes I leave the beer in, but usually pour the beer off after a month or so and replace with distilled water.

I recently made a new starter out of some yeast I had stored this way 29 months earlier. This is the longest I have ever left one before trying to use it again. It worked fine, showing activity within a day. I have not had a problem with any of the yeasts I have stored this way.
 
I'm looking to store the yeast for maybe a few months or so. I would only split it to make 4 jars because of space. I've seen the freezing with glycerine but that's to involved for me right now. I'm just going to put it into the fridge.
 

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