Pre-harvesting yeast ???

Ok, this may have been discussed before, but I am not sure exactly how I would even search for it, so I am just going to be lazy and throw out a question and see what kind of answers I get.

I know that most people harvest yeast from the primary because there is SO MUCH of that wonderful stuff in there, but that also means more labor involved in the yeast washing, since you have a larger volume, and hops, etc. to deal with. On top of that, don't you have a greater chance of infection or mutation? I was wondering if anyone out there has taken a cue from sourdough bread bakers.

Instead of harvesting the yeast from the primary, why not just make a slightly larger starter, and keep back part of the starter? Sourdough bakers take their "mother" and add some flour and water to it, let it sit over night, and then put part of that back in the fridge, and keep the rest out for baking with. It seems like washing a pint of unhopped starter would be easier than a carboy of hopped beer.

Thoughts?
Ideas?

I reuse yeast from the primary after I rack to secondary. I don't wash it, and by that point it is in fermented beer. Very unlikely to become contaminated. I put it in a sanitized jar in the fridge and use it up to 3 months later.

Making a bigger starter would work, but your primary makes a hell of a lot of yeast.

This would work just fine. If you have any extra white labs vials or any other container, you can fill one up from the starter to use for your next starter.

This is what I do for all of my yeast. I aliquot some of the cells into 20% glycerol and flash-freeze them for storage.

Yuri has a pretty good protocol on yeast harvesting:

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showpost.php?p=114104&postcount=56

iamjonsharp said:

This would work just fine. If you have any extra white labs vials or any other container, you can fill one up from the starter to use for your next starter.

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I have a ton of pint size canning jars... easy to clean, easy to find more, easy to store in the beer fridge.
I will admit, those little vials do take up less space, but:
1) my LHBS carries Wyeast but not White Labs
2) my canning jars stand up on their own
3) if I need more in a hurry, I can pick up more at any number of places in town
4) it is easier to label the canning jar

I "bank" my yeast. I like having two dozen strains of yeast on hand at any time. I also do exactly what you're describing. I makde a starter wort, pitch the yeast, put it on my stirplate and let it sit until it does from brownish wort to a murky solution with visable yeast. I then add more wort and repeat.

I then put the starter in the fridge for two days so the yeast go dormant, decant off the wort to keep the yeast in high concentrations and then transfer them into baby food jars with a 1/3 glycerine solution.

but I am not sure exactly how I would even search for it

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All you have to do is type Yeast Harvesting or Yeast washing into the search function on the menu bar, and you will get dozens upon dozens of results.

Not trying to be a smart a$$ just helping you figure out how to use the search.

Cheers

I use yeast slants to culture my yeast. I can inoculate a slant from a single, miniscule drop of yeast slurry. Usually when I open a new smack pack or vial of yeast, I'll inoculate three slants from it before pitching it into a starter. It takes a bit more preparation and some less common equipment (vials, etc) than pouring yeast into baby food jars, but the actual inoculating process is trivially easy - sterilize your wire/loop, open slant, dip and get drop of yeast, smear on slant surface, put cap back on, and continue as usual.

WOP31 said:

All you have to do is type Yeast Harvesting or Yeast washing into the search function on the menu bar, and you will get dozens upon dozens of results.

Not trying to be a smart a$$ just helping you figure out how to use the search.

Cheers

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And I in turn am not trying to be one when I say that I am fully capable of USING the search features... my point was more that I was too lazy to read through every thread that has ever been written on harvesting or washing to see if anyone else had ever discussed this particular method for keeping yeast around.

Funkenjaeger said:

It takes a bit more preparation and some less common equipment (vials, etc) than pouring yeast into baby food jars, but the actual inoculating process is trivially easy - sterilize your wire/loop, open slant, dip and get drop of yeast, smear on slant surface, put cap back on, and continue as usual.

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Perhaps, but it doesn't sound like as much fun. I'm probably in a slim minority here when I say I actually ENJOY yeast culturing. I'd also wonder if that might not distrupt the ratio of strains in certain yeast blends. I've got a few styles that are ale/lager hybrids, and I think that taking a small sample would potentially throw that mix off. Then again, it's possible that there are plenty of cells in each drop that that's a non-issue.

I wouldn't mind dropping some cash on some decent vials though if only because they're "look" more professional.

Kevin Dean said:

I wouldn't mind dropping some cash on some decent vials though if only because they're "look" more professional.

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I built a counter flow chiller from some garden hose and some copper pipe, and it is held together in a nice neat little package with blue duct tape...
I built a stir plate with some old computer parts and there are wires running all over the place from the computer power supply that I used...
and I am building my "brew pub" in my basement, in what used to be my wood shop, and still will be a multi-function room for a bit longer...
putting some vials in the old beatup "garage" fridge is not going to make a bit of difference in making anything I do look more professional

and please, don't take this as a smart a$$ response, as much as anyone, I can appreciate that some things are simply done for the "cool" factor... but in this particular instance, I just had to laugh my a$$ off...

Kevin Dean said:

Perhaps, but it doesn't sound like as much fun. I'm probably in a slim minority here when I say I actually ENJOY yeast culturing. I'd also wonder if that might not distrupt the ratio of strains in certain yeast blends. I've got a few styles that are ale/lager hybrids, and I think that taking a small sample would potentially throw that mix off. Then again, it's possible that there are plenty of cells in each drop that that's a non-issue.

I wouldn't mind dropping some cash on some decent vials though if only because they're "look" more professional.

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On the contrary, I think it's a ton of fun - I think that when using slants you get to see a lot more of the "cool" stuff, which is a big part of the reason why I use this method instead of some of the other common ones - to me, just dumping some yeast from a starter/cake into a jar doesn't sound nearly as interesting or fun.

There's plenty to do, as I have to clean vials and prepare the slants in large batches in advance, by boiling up wort/gelatin mixture, transferring into vials, and refrigerating them at an angle. When I inoculate, I've got a nice nichrome inoculating loop, alcohol and a flame, and all that. When I said it was quick and easy, that was specifically in reference to the inoculation process which you would do on brew day or when making a starter, thus not adding much work or time to your brew day. The rest of the prep work is done at your leisure.

And I've got to say, it's really cool to see a slant grow. When you inoculate it there's often not even enough yeast that you can even see anything on the slant surface at first, and then you see colonies grow and soon it looks like this:


Then for stepping them up, I go from slant to 10ml test tube of wort, to 100ml erlenmeyer, to 1L erlenmeyer.

As far as screwing up yeast blend balance, yeah, I can see that being a bit of an issue. In that case I'd want to be sure to inoculate with more yeast than usual to ensure a lot of cells of each type - maybe switch to petri dish plates instead of slants, for more surface area. For normal use though, it's a great method - each colony that grows does so from a very small number of yeast cells, so it is very pure. It's also really easy to tell if there's any kind of infection - any fuzzy/furry/funny colored areas are a dead giveaway.

it'll work ok, but if you wash the yeast cake after primary, you'll get 4-6 vials/jars of yeast, each would be almost a pitchable amount on its own, certainly pitchable if you make a small starter.

Washing yeast is not hard at all. i use pint Mason jars, a bucket of sanitizer, pre-boiled and cooled water, and the fridge to make the yeast drop out.

rabidgerbil said:

I built a counter flow chiller from some garden hose and some copper pipe, and it is held together in a nice neat little package with blue duct tape...
I built a stir plate with some old computer parts and there are wires running all over the place from the computer power supply that I used...
and I am building my "brew pub" in my basement, in what used to be my wood shop, and still will be a multi-function room for a bit longer...
putting some vials in the old beatup "garage" fridge is not going to make a bit of difference in making anything I do look more professional

and please, don't take this as a smart a$$ response, as much as anyone, I can appreciate that some things are simply done for the "cool" factor... but in this particular instance, I just had to laugh my a$$ off...

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Damn, I hate to be off topic, but hot wort through a normal garden hose is going to LEACH LOTS OF LEAD INTO YOUR WORT. Hopefully you have a potable water safe hose.

cheezydemon said:

Damn, I hate to be off topic, but hot wort through a normal garden hose is going to LEACH LOTS OF LEAD INTO YOUR WORT. Hopefully you have a potable water safe hose.

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Completely irrelevant, because in a counter-flow chiller of standard design, the wort ONLY goes through the inside of the copper tubing, and only the cooling water touches the hose. Unless he built it radically different from the "normal" design, there's no issue.

cheezydemon said:

Damn, I hate to be off topic, but hot wort through a normal garden hose is going to LEACH LOTS OF LEAD INTO YOUR WORT. Hopefully you have a potable water safe hose.

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OK, that was my best laugh of the day...
i see where the confusion came from... i wrote "and copper pipe"
when i mean to write "and copper tubing"... the copper is INSIDE the garden hose.
the water runs through the hose, and the beer runs through the tubing...
all is good, and with the cold water we have here, if i wanted to, i could get it so
cold that the yeast would not wake up for days... and trust me... i know the hard way... man that was annoying.

rabidgerbil said:

please, don't take this as a smart a$$ response, as much as anyone, I can appreciate that some things are simply done for the "cool" factor... but in this particular instance, I just had to laugh my a$$ off..

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No problem. No, I know exactly what you mean. When I say my "stirplate" I'm talking about a ghetto PC fan, some tiny little magnets I bought at a craft store, some super glue and some gnarly wire duct tapped to my rheostat... If I had a bottle of Gorilla Glue at the time, I'd have glued THAT to the table. My stirplate certainly qualifies for the "Show us your junk" thread. Hell, even my STIR bar is ghetto... Two magnets stuffed neatly into a cut straw.

Mainly the reason I'm thinking vials is because I can fit more in my freezer. I have to admit, it DOES have the cool-factor (In a twisted sense) but it's mainly that they're designed for this kind of thing. Baby food jars are "good enough" but I'm sure over time they'll degread pretty rapidly or something, leak, whatever.

funkenjager said:

There's plenty to do, as I have to clean vials and prepare the slants in large batches in advance, by boiling up wort/gelatin mixture, transferring into vials, and refrigerating them at an angle.

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Was that a brain fart or am I missing something? You mentioned your wort/gelatin mixture... Do you actually use gelatin or was that supposed to be glycerine? What benefit does the gelatin provide?

I know they're called slants, probably because the liquid is "slanty" after side-storage. What does the tilt actually do, if anything?

he meant gelatin, you mix gelatin and wort to create a "solid" growth media, and by putting it on a slant, you get a larger surface area inside that puny little tube for growing yeast on, and therefor, more yeast

rabidgerbil said:

he meant gelatin, you mix gelatin and wort to create a "solid" growth media, and by putting it on a slant, you get a larger surface area inside that puny little tube for growing yeast on, and therefor, more yeast

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Yep, exactly right. The gelatin/wort mixture is serves the same purpose as the agar mixture they use in petri dishes and the like, it's just more suited to yeast growth. I could be using petri dishes, but they take up more space, and the tiny vials are perfectly suitable when you make a slant for sufficient surface area.

In case you didn't already grasp this part, I am refrigerating these, not freezing them - thus I'm not using glycerin. The vials are 1 dram (4mL) in size, and they're very small (about 15mm diameter, 45mm tall) so they don't take up much fridge space.

Funkenjaeger said:

Yep, exactly right. The gelatin/wort mixture is serves the same purpose as the agar mixture they use in petri dishes and the like, it's just more suited to yeast growth. I could be using petri dishes, but they take up more space, and the tiny vials are perfectly suitable when you make a slant for sufficient surface area.

In case you didn't already grasp this part, I am refrigerating these, not freezing them - thus I'm not using glycerin. The vials are 1 dram (4mL) in size, and they're very small (about 15mm diameter, 45mm tall) so they don't take up much fridge space.

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So how you use one of those tubes? How do you get the yeast into your starter?
How many times would you need to step up a starter to get up to a 2000 ml starter?

rabidgerbil said:

How many times would you need to step up a starter to get up to a 2000 ml starter?

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The general rule is no more than 10 times per volume of slurry/starter.

So if you start with 10ml of yeast slurry, add about 100 ml wort starter, and increase accordingly until you get to 2000ml.

(Edit: Once you've got 100ml, you can step up to 1000ml 24hrs later, etc.)

iamjonsharp said:

The general rule is no more than 10 times per volume of slurry/starter.

So if you start with 10ml of yeast slurry, add about 100 ml wort starter, and increase accordingly until you get to 2000ml.

(Edit: Once you've got 100ml, you can step up to 1000ml 24hrs later, etc.)

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NOTE: this is not a smart a$$ response

Thank you, and I do know the rule, but that does not answer my question about his slant tubes. I know what ten ml of yeast slurry would look like, but I have no idea how to figure out how much yeast is in one of those little tubes he is making, or how one would go about getting what is in those tubes into a starter...

I don't imagine that you can warm up the tube enough to melt the gelatin and dump it out, without killing the yeast, so I am figuring that he must use something like a loop to get a sample back out of the tube and inoculate a starter with that.
That being the case, and the ten times rule added in, I would think that this would take a while to be able to have a usable size starter.

rabidgerbil said:

So how you use one of those tubes? How do you get the yeast into your starter?
How many times would you need to step up a starter to get up to a 2000 ml starter?

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To go from a slant to a pitchable quantity of yeast, I basically step it up 3 times.
I start with a test tube with about 10mL of wort in it (I prepare those in advance also), take an eye dropper and squirt some of the wort into the slant, and use my inoculating loop to swirl it a bit and scrape the yeast off the surface to get it in solution. Then I dump it into the test tube - at that point it's just a very small starter.
Once the yeast has grown sufficiently, I pitch the contents of the test tube into a 100mL starter, and once that is done I pitch into a 1L starter.

So basically, I am just following the 10:1 rule, and just considering the slant to be about equivalent to 1mL of yeast slurry. I am certain that it is usually equivalent to more yeast than that, but I figure that going from the slant to the first tiny starter is the most critical step, so I play it safe.

I know that some people who use slants skip some of this and go straight from a slant into a larger (500mL or so) starter, and have it done in 24-36 hours, and then straight into a 1-2L starter from there. I don't mind adding the extra step, playing it safe whenever I can afford to do so.

Funkenjaeger said:

To go from a slant to a pitchable quantity of yeast, I basically step it up 3 times.
I start with a test tube with about 10mL of wort in it (I prepare those in advance also), take an eye dropper and squirt some of the wort into the slant, and use my inoculating loop to swirl it a bit and scrape the yeast off the surface to get it in solution. Then I dump it into the test tube - at that point it's just a very small starter.
Once the yeast has grown sufficiently, I pitch the contents of the test tube into a 100mL starter, and once that is done I pitch into a 1L starter.

So basically, I am just following the 10:1 rule, and just considering the slant to be about equivalent to 1mL of yeast slurry. I am certain that it is usually equivalent to more yeast than that, but I figure that going from the slant to the first tiny starter is the most critical step, so I play it safe.

I know that some people who use slants skip some of this and go straight from a slant into a larger (500mL or so) starter, and have it done in 24-36 hours, and then straight into a 1-2L starter from there. I do multiple steps as I described whenever I have the time to do so, because I have heard that it's safest to stick to a 10:1 step up ratio for each starter as a rule of thumb - and I prefer to play it safe when I can afford to do so.

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Ok, so my next obvious question is, how long does that process take?
You decide that you want to brew a particular style, and need a specific yeast for it, how many days in advance do you need to prepare before brew day?

rabidgerbil said:

Ok, so my next obvious question is, how long does that process take?
You decide that you want to brew a particular style, and need a specific yeast for it, how many days in advance do you need to prepare before brew day?

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Wish I had a better answer, but so far I haven't tried rushing it to see how quickly I can get a starter made - I've just been letting them sit "more than long enough" in each starter, as I've been planning far enough in advance. I guess offhand I'd say maybe 3 days, one for each step?

One thing you can do is make a pitchable-sized starter, ferment it out, crash cool, decant some liquid, swirl and pour into a sanitized beer bottle, cap it and refrigerate until brew day. Would be a good way to keep your most-used yeast varieties (and any you thought you'd be using in the near future) on hand in pitchable quantities, while keeping a wide variety of yeast on hand in the form of slants.