Anyone successfully harvest yeast from Fuller's 1845?

It's bottle-conditioned, and when I saw it at my beer store, I thought this would be the perfect chance to try harvesting yeast for the first time. I have successfully made starters in the past. But my starter isn't doing much. It seems pretty dead. There was definitely some "stuff" in the bottom of the bottle, but I'm getting virtually no activity. I wonder if the 100 days of conditioning time, plus a transoceanic voyage, plus who knows how long sitting, might have killed it?

I've read that others have successfully harvested from 1845 before, although I think it had to be stepped up a few times to pitching rate.

For what its worth, the Fullers yeast strain is White Labs WLP002 / Wyeast 1968 London ESB, if you don't have luck with your bottle.

dcHokie said:

I've read that others have successfully harvested from 1845 before, although I think it had to be stepped up a few times to pitching rate.

For what its worth, the Fullers yeast strain is White Labs WLP002 / Wyeast 1968 London ESB, if you don't have luck with your bottle.

Click to expand...

But the white labs vial doesn't come with a beer to drink!!!

An old thread, but now that I have succesfully extracted the yeast from 1845, I can say that it is possible. But the amount of viable yeast cells in a bottle of 1845 is quite small. Plating the dregs on agar tends to give some colonies that can be grown further. If you culture the dregs directly in a very small volume of wort, it should be possible, but it may be challenging and there will be a chance of contamination. Fuller's IPA tends to contain more yeast cells and the ABV is lower so it is probably easier to culture the same yeast from a bottle of their IPA. I have heard that people have had great results with the yeast grown from IPA and I am going to plate the dregs from a bottle of IPA tonight.