Yeast Washing Illustrated

Last night I took my SMALLEST jar of washed yeast. There was only about a teaspoon of actual yeast (1056), maybe even less. I boiled a quart of wort I had canned and put it in the 1 litre flask. I shook the bejesus out of it lots of times as it cooled to add some 02. Pitched the little bit of yeast. Not much action this morning, but when I got home from work tonight, it had a nice head of foam on top. I shook it again and lot of Co2 came out of solution. I have some 8 oz jars that are 1/2 full of yeast. This is the BALLS!

This was from the jar on the left of post #430.

AND I ordered a stir plate a week ago. Just waiting........

David

wait a second, doesnt "swirling" the sanitized water+yeast cake in the carboy defeat the whole oxygen free liquid belief?

I"ve got my jars boiling and I have a quart jar filled with my yeast from a Belgian Wit (which was so good we debated drinking it warm and flat). We are going to brew this same Wit this weekend so I'm about to save $6.95 on this batch and who knows how many ofter that.

You gotta love this site and the collective wisdom of all these brewers!

Nick

does anyone happen to know the answer to my question?

I can't answer your question. I did find out the yeast will separate out once the water is added. Otherwise you will be waiting the same as your bear to drop clear. I have a conical, so I put the boiled and cooled water in the collection jar, open the valve and let it mix. It separates, then I suck the yeast layer out with a sanitized turkey baster.

All I can say is so far it works. I proofed one sample and plan to use my first one in real beer soon.

I now have 9 jars of saved washed yeast under boiled and cooled water. Tonight I bought a dozen of 4 ounce canning jars. I can fit twice as many in the same space. Collecting more tomorrow night. I am saving some $s AND having fun.

Stir plate should be here tomorrow......

I got it bad........

Just another member of the asylum.
David

CaliBrewin said:

wait a second, doesnt "swirling" the sanitized water+yeast cake in the carboy defeat the whole oxygen free liquid belief?

Click to expand...

No. You don't shake it, you gently swirl it. You just want to move it around a bit to get the yeast in suspension, but not so much that you shake it and start introducing oxygen.

It's also not as vital to keep O2 out at this point, if I understand correctly. You want O2 out of your beer because it will oxidize it. In this case you aren't making beer, just separating out the yeast. When you pitch that yeast into another beer, you're going to want to oxygenate it then anyway.

Ok I am planning on re-using my yeast for the first time and I could use a bit of help. I tried to do this before and ended up saving the yeast but not using it. I'm wondering a bit about the process and why I need to do it differently than what I did before.

After I siphon, I usually have a centimeter or so of beer left on top of my yeast, I can easily use this to swirl around and liquefy the slurry - no need for added water. Can I then just pour this whole beery mess into a sanitized cambro/tupperware and slap it in the fridge? I will then have one container with a mass of slurry in it. The plan is to then use that slurry (perhaps decant first?) as the starter for my Imperial IPA.

What am I missing here? What exactly is getting "washed" ? Do I need to remove the trub from the yeast through some kind of washing process? Also, should I make a starter using this slurry or just pitch the slurry.

It you save trub and all, you get trub and all. it's probably ok if you use it up really quickly, but over a period of time it will break down.

When you do the yeast washing outlined in this thread, you get nice clean white yeast without trub and hops debris.

You should still do a starter, especially if you've been saving the yeast for a while. I've kept washed yeast up to a year or more with good results.

Ok... I am in a bit of a hurry, and want to use this yeast only a couple days after I harvest it. One thing that confuses me about all of this is how to estimate cell count volumes... The Mr Malty pitching rate calculator has options for Yeast Slurry - is that equivalent to what is left in the carboy, or is that equivalent to the yeast that is washed? How do I know how much to add to a starter to get the proper volumes?

If I wasn't so nervous about cleanliness, I would probably just pitch the new beer on top of this old cake, but I have never done that before and at least want to clean the Krausen mess out of the fermenter, that is why I am heading down this route.

The washed yeast sediment is about equal in density to what you'd find in a White Labs vial or Wyeast smack pack.

How much YEAST is in a smack pack and how much is nutrient?

I have been wondering about that.

David

Much easier to see in a White Labs vial...if you have one handy, there's about the same amount of yeast in a White Labs vial and a Wyeast smack pack.

My wife cleaned out the fridge today.

She didn't know what the "old jar of gunk in the back" was.

MY PACMAN!!!!!!!!!

I'm gonna go cry now.

I wonder if it would have helped or made matters worse had it been labeled "Pacman".

So what is all the junk that settles to the bottom? I just washed a starter I had been building up for about a week and it had quite a layer of sediment. After shaking it all up and letting it settle there was a lot of stuff at the bottom. It looks a lot like yeast to me, I'm sure I just dumped a bunch down the drain. We'll see how much I end up with after it sits in the fridge over night. I'm planning on decanting off the top tomorrow and doing some cell counts.

NotALamer said:

So what is all the junk that settles to the bottom? I just washed a starter I had been building up for about a week and it had quite a layer of sediment. After shaking it all up and letting it settle there was a lot of stuff at the bottom. It looks a lot like yeast to me, I'm sure I just dumped a bunch down the drain. We'll see how much I end up with after it sits in the fridge over night. I'm planning on decanting off the top tomorrow and doing some cell counts.

Click to expand...

At room temp, when you shake it up and let it sit, all the dead stuff sinks to the bottom first. If it's a starter, that's (mostly) dead yeast. If you're washing a yeast cake then it also has hop particles, break material and whatever else might have been in there.

When you put it in the fridge, the live yeast go dormant and sink to the bottom.

Sounds good, I'm planning on doing a methylene blue stain to check the viability. It should be pretty high since this is a fresh starter from two days ago, and I just washed it. Is 24 hours enough time for all the dormant yeast to settle out? How long does it usually take?

Still looks pretty cloudy but Palmer said overnight was OK in HTB.

So those of you using a Sun Tea jug (which I will be buying soon) it looks like you are just dumping the water into the fermenter, swirling it then dumping the whole thing into the jug from there. Is that right?

Dump the water into the fermenter, swirl it, let the fermenter settle for 20 minutes, then pour the liquid (but not the sediment) into the sun tea jug, let that settle for 20 minutes, then pour the liquid (but not sediment) from the sun tea jug into the small jars.

Rick500 said:

Dump the water into the fermenter, swirl it, let the fermenter settle for 20 minutes, then pour the liquid (but not the sediment) into the sun tea jug, let that settle for 20 minutes, then pour the liquid (but not sediment) from the sun tea jug into the small jars.

Click to expand...

gotcha, from what I read it looked liked they were skipping a step.

thanks!

I'm thinkin I'm hooked.

I have enough yeast for a year.... 14 jars total, 3 different kinds of yeast... I went to 4 oz jars for the space.

1 quick question on how much water to use....I am to use enough water to fill 4 mason jars and the extra vessel....Does it matter what size vessel it is.....I'm confused on the fact that the author puts water from a 4 mason jars and the extra container in the carboy....

If your just looking to fill 4 mason jars, wouldn't that be all the water you would need to boil up and put into the carboy....

I put as much water as stuff I have collected. If I get 8 oz of beer/yeast, I add 8oz boiled and cooled water and stir. The yeast falls out in an hour or less. I then suck it out with a turkey baster and put it in the small jars. I then top up with boiled and cooled water so there is minimal head space.

I have proffed one sample and it took right off.

Star San was out in full force.

I've been pouring everything off the yeast in the carboy as much as possible, then adding one gallon of boiled/cooled water to the carboy. I end up, after all the settling and decanting steps, with between three and five pint Mason jars.

I'm going to try this with the trub from an APA that's fermenting right now (with Safale 05). I probably won't brew with it for a few months, though as I'm trying a variety of styles and my next few batches call for more specialized yeast. How long will washed yeast keep?

I have washed a few batches of yeast, but haven't used any of them yet. As of right now, I only have one batch (I threw out the others because they froze in an out door fridge). Right now I have 5 one pint mason jars of Burton in the fridge and would like to do more, but I really don't want to take up my fridge with pint jars.

I know I can get real kooky with how much I can get involved in with this, but what is my next logical step? Should I order a bunch of glass test tubes and a rack from cynmar? If I'm just looking to keep a supply in fridge and compact the space, is this the route I should go? When should I dump yeast that I've washed and never wind up using? (I can't imagine myself using 5 vials of Burton any time soon when I primarily use WLP001 as my standard liquid yeast).

If I wanted to start a frozen yeast bank, is this where I get all the agar(sp) plates and whatnot?

**** me. I've been searching for days for the sun tea jug. Finally found one 20 minutes across town and picked up an herb ball, too. Get 20 paces from my door and dropped the thing. Shattered everywhere. Cut my fingers up.

****!!!!!

Doh! Hope your fingers didn't suffer too much.

Went back the other night and picked up another jug. I did the turn the carboy on it's side trick and then decanted that into the tea jug. At first I wasn't impressed with the final results, I almost got on here to talk about how much I suck at washing yeast. But after the jars settled in the fridge I saw a lot more yeast had dropped out. Then I got home today and it's really thick. My girlfriend even noticed without me saying anything about it.

So I am here to advocate the turn-carboy-on-side-then-decant-into-tea jug method. Works great.

Alright, I was turning the camera on and off the whole time I was getting a hair cut so I could show off the skillz. Then had to search everywhere to find the camera chord.

Here's my very ****ty photo of my washed Irish Ale yeast using the method mentioned above.

Did this for the first time this morning. The 3 720 ml jars are now settling. I had 4 jars ready but really needed just the 3. The large jar is 2500 ml, so logical that I'd need just the 3. But I prepped 4 and had them all ready with water and such. Process went well. They're settling in the fridge now and all seems well. They're still cloudy though, so no follow up, settled photos yet.







You can see the brown line in the first photo, which is not a shadow. That's the brown sediment. In the last photo, you can see what was left behind in the large jar. There's a very clear line where the brown sediment is settled there. You can see a tiny amount of white above it in that photo. But the three jars were totally full, so that's that.

And here's after settling in the fridge for four hours. You can see a couple of small floaters at the top of the two right jars. Otherwise, milky goodness settling into layers. The bottom's hard to see, but it's powdery yeast, nice and thick.

How do you get the yeast from the carboy into the big Mason Jar? Just pour it?

Yep. Pour just the liquid with the yeast suspended in it. Leave the sediment behind.

Surprised no one has asked this yet (got to page 10 or 12 and didn't see it)...

You put all off the jars in the fridge full of water, even the pint jars. Then later you fill the pint jars from the larger one.... but the pint jars are already full because you left the water from the boil in them. So when do you pour the water out of the pint jars, just before filling? Is this to make sure that no nasties can get into the jar while its cooling because its full of sterilized water?

I believe they all are emptied into the fermenter. So the pint jars are empty too when you fill them with the larger jar.

Ah, I read that post several times and didn't pick up on that part. I see that now but it still doesn't seem right... I end up pouring large jar + 4 pints into the fermenter. Swirl and fill large jar. I'm supposed to have 4 pints left in fermenter when this is done? Seems like I'd be watering down my yeast solution and leaving a bunch in the fermenter.

After dumping in the fermenter, if you let it sit for a few minutes the heavier stuff will sink, leaving the yeast up in suspension. the liquid you leave behind is from the bottom so you leave trub and hop particles and dead yeast clumps behind.

All makes sense now. Thanks guys