Harvesting from the yeast cake without washing

This is more of a question on how to use the Mr Malty pitching calculator properly when harvesting yeast from the yeast cake.

I will soon be looking to harvest from a Nottingham yeast cake and pitch this into a 1.073 winter warmer beer.

The Mr Malty calculator suggests 3 packets of dry yeast for a 1.073 beer, so I figured I would just harvest from the Nottingham yeast cake currently sitting under a session ale in my fermenter.

I don't have the equipment to wash/store etc and think that would be overkill for a relatively cheap yeast anyway.

My plan is to bottle the beer currently on top of the Nottingham yeast cake and harvest from it the same day I brew the winter warmer.

So: What do I put in for the harvest date on the Mr Malty calculator to figure out how much of the cake to collect?

Would I be right to assume that I type in the original pitching date of the yeast?

Thanks!

1/2 cup fresh thick slurry is about like a 11 gram pack of dry yeast.

I don't rinse yeast anymore and I seldom use Mr. Malty.

Now whenever I do reuse yeast (which I am currently doing) I always pour the yeast cake into a sanitized glass jar which can hold the whole liquid and let it sit for a few hours until you can see the nice striations. I then pour off the top of the yeast and pitch a cup of the remaining liquid and I have had very good results so far.

The whole yeast cake will contain about 4X the yeast required to brew a batch of the same strength as the original beer.

You can ratio that amount directly to the gravity of the beer you are about to pitch to. Say you harvested from a beer with an OG of 1.040, and are pitching to 1.080, then you will need twice the yeast (or half the original cake). If you go from a 1.050 to a 1.075 you will need 1.5 times the yeast (or 3/8ths of the cake).

It's a very crude method, but it beats figuring out what quantity of the slurry is yeast. And this works for a thick or thin slurry, or for one with lots of hops and trub versus a clean one.

Calder said:

The whole yeast cake will contain about 4X the yeast required to brew a batch of the same strength as the original beer.

You can ratio that amount directly to the gravity of the beer you are about to pitch to. Say you harvested from a beer with an OG of 1.040, and are pitching to 1.080, then you will need twice the yeast (or half the original cake). If you go from a 1.050 to a 1.075 you will need 1.5 times the yeast (or 3/8ths of the cake).

It's a very crude method, but it beats figuring out what quantity of the slurry is yeast. And this works for a thick or thin slurry, or for one with lots of hops and trub versus a clean one.

Click to expand...

That's interesting. Thanks for sharing.