pre iipa brew for yeast cake?????

What would you brew before a 5 gallon double ipa to use the yeast cake? I need to build up some yeast anyway and plan on doing a preiipa beer just for the cake.... Smallish pale ale is obvious choice, but using Wl001 leaves such a broad spectrum of styles - wwyd??

A pale ale would be my choice just because it's somewhat similar in flavor and will not stress the yeast with too much alcohol. However, since an iipa has such strong flavors, you could almost do anything on the lighter side of the spectrum that uses a CA Ale yeast.

No matter what you choose, you may want to consider only using as much of the yeast cake as is "needed" rather than the whole cake. Some here will disagree, but using the whole yeast cake can be overpitching for some beers. Using the necessary amount will give you some yeast growth to contribute the proper esters. Even for a very clean yeast like California Ale, you do want some "character" from the yeast. Just something to consider...

Proper Yeast Pitching Rates

I just did a double American pale ale on the yeast cake of a American amber. Didn't have time to wash the yeast and had no adverse flavors. Wyeast American Ale yeast.

So long as it's a smaller beer the sky's the limit. If you for example make an American Stout I would wash the yeast before reusing it but if the styles are close don't worry.

After doing this once I'll be planning my brew schedule around repitching from now on.

ScottD13 said:

I just did a double American pale ale on the yeast cake of a American amber. Didn't have time to wash the yeast and had no adverse flavors. Wyeast American Ale yeast.

So long as it's a smaller beer the sky's the limit. If you for example make an American Stout I would wash the yeast before reusing it but if the styles are close don't worry.

After doing this once I'll be planning my brew schedule around repitching from now on.

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Its not about getting adverse flavors so much as not getting the character from the yeast that you want. The yeast imparts a lot of its character during the aerobic reproductive phase and pitching onto a full cake means the yeast will not produce a good portion of the esters that we treasure.

I agree with you on planning my brewing on the available yeast though. I love harvesting yeast and having copious quantities of slurry to pitch when I do a batch. This is also another benefit of harvesting and cleansing though in that you get multiple containers of pitchable yeast from a single cake.

mandoman said:

What would you brew before a 5 gallon double ipa to use the yeast cake?

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+1 to a small-ish pale ale. For a tried-and-tested recipe you could go with either Edwort's Haus Pale Ale or BM's Centennial Blonde. Though I'd be very tempted to take the opportunity to make a SMaSH beer (a beer made with just a Single Malt type and a Single Hop type). You could try two-row + Cascade, or Vienna + Amarillo, or pilsner + Centennial, or Munich + Fuggles. It's a great way of learning about the specific flavor that each ingredient imparts.

I just did an IIPA (SG ~1.090) and just used a packet of dry US-05. Put it on oak a couple days ago and couldn't have asked for anything better at that point. No starter or cake needed. I would recommend it highly.

dontman said:

Its not about getting adverse flavors so much as not getting the character from the yeast that you want. The yeast imparts a lot of its character during the aerobic reproductive phase and pitching onto a full cake means the yeast will not produce a good portion of the esters that we treasure.

I agree with you on planning my brewing on the available yeast though. I love harvesting yeast and having copious quantities of slurry to pitch when I do a batch. This is also another benefit of harvesting and cleansing though in that you get multiple containers of pitchable yeast from a single cake.

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I used Mr Malty's yeast pitch rate calculator for the repitch and in this case I didn't even have enough yeast from the original batch! You bring up an excellent point that I'm aware of but perhaps mandoman is not.

mandoman check out Mr Malty Pitching Rate Calculator and use the pitch rate calculator. Make sure to use the repitch from slurry tab.

Good post dontman, this was my first repitch and I should have rememeber that!

yeah, mrmalty rules.

I just brewed 5 gallons of american amber ale - i had most of the ingredients and could get it into the 'style'. It is starting at 1.040 and I'm using a 1.5 L starter of wl001 and will use the cake (or most of it) for the IIPA.

just to be sure since I've never used the mrmalty 'pitch from slurry' option.

Since I'll be pitching from a slurry comprised of the last pinch of amber from the previous batch I moved the yeast concentration slider to 1 billions cells or all the way to the left. I assume there's a lot of non-yeast in there and estimated this about 20%. I targeted a OG of 1.095 for 5.5 gallons.

This calculates 438 ml of cake slurry. This equates to about 350 billion cells (or 3.5 vials)

Now if I play with the sliders I can lower this to less than 100 ml if the slurry is the thickest (far right) and non yeast low (far left). This doesn't make sense. If you assume a store bought vial is thick and mostly yeast then you'd need less than 1 vial of white labs for 5 gallons of 1.095???!!!???

I assume there is a difference between the conditions of a store bought starter and a recently active cake?! ?!

Either way, I'm going to pitch about a half liter up to half the whole cake depending.......