My Burton Union

Edit: This is not a Burton Union, but is a good way to harvest happy, healthy yeast for future brews. Thanks to all the great ideas here. It goes right into my 2L flask. I preboil water and cool it in my flask so the yeast drop right into an oxygen depleted water environment and go to sleep. Then when blowoff is done, I just pour off all but 1 jar of water, swirl the yeast to resuspend, pour into a sterile jar and put back into the fridge. Works like a champ! This is Bell's yeast blowing off the top of a Two Hearted clone.

Doesn't a Burton Union recirculate the wort to prevent loss? That being said, it looks like a nice way of collecting yeast.

scoundrel said:

Doesn't a Burton Union recirculate the wort to prevent loss? That being said, it looks like a nice way of collecting yeast.

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Ya, this is a great way to collect the yeast...I believe a burton union system send the yeast to another vessel with fresh wort to then ferment that batch...and so on.

Burton union is usually a small box with an input and output hoses connecting from the fermentor. Input comes in on top blowing off yeast into the box where the output is siuated about 1/2 inch from the bottom to allow wort to flow back into the fermentor thus leaving the settled yeast in the box.
You can also do what brett said and just hook up a blow off into another carboy, just make sure the second carboy has an airlock to let the pressure out.
This is a great way to reuse yeast at its peak growth and krausen phase.

That's pretty friggin sweet! Great way to reuse yeast.

I stand corrected. My non-Burton Union method of reharvesting yeast for next batch then.

pabloj13 said:

I stand corrected. My non-Burton Union method of reharvesting yeast for next batch then.

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Aww, sorry man. I wasn't trying to poo poo it. It looks great and is a great technique to harvest yeast.

scoundrel said:

Aww, sorry man. I wasn't trying to poo poo it. It looks great and is a great technique to harvest yeast.

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Oh no, I'm glad you mentioned it. No worries.

One more question. Where did you get the orange caps for the carboy and flask? Did you make them or buy them?

scoundrel said:

One more question. Where did you get the orange caps for the carboy and flask? Did you make them or buy them?

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My LHBS sells them here. I love them. They are quite stretchy so they go over the mouth of the carboy or flask or whatever, regardless of size, they don't slide out when wet with Starsan like some stoppers do, and I just drilled an extra hole in the one to be used for the collection vessel.

Not a bad little harvest!

Nice! I had one blowing off and I brewed another batch, and literally hooked the blowoff tube of one to the other! It worked great. Food for thought, read comment #11 on that thread...I always remembered what this guy said. If you are planning on using this yeast for multiple generations, you may be selecting for under-attenuating yeast by taking only blowoff. Not sure if that is true, but it did make me think about the impact we have on the selection of yeast as it goes from generation to generation.

having said that, looks great so brew on!

I don't know why I didn't ever think to do this! I have my blowoff tube going from my carboy to a pitcher of water/starsan solution. It would be simple to switch the pitcher out with a sanitized flask and then make a starter out of it. Great idea!

Usually in the spring/summer I'm brewing pale ales, ambers, or IPAs that use WY1056 so this is a good idea to caught down on costs.