Yeast Harvest After Gelatin???

I've done a ton of reading here and couldn't find the answer to this question before posting. If it is here already I apologize.
My question is can you harvest your yeast cake after you cold crash and fine with gelatin? Has anyone done this with successful results? Seems to me you don't want that stuff in your trub if your'e trying to harvest it and wonder if it is easily separated with the trub.

I suppose you could but IMO you want to harvest earlier to get a larger concentration of more flocculant yeast. The trub is no big deal. If you are making slants you'll want to wash the yeast anyway and if you're just saving some slurry short term to re-pitch most of the elements in the trub are good yeast food.

I've harvested multiple times after using gelatin without any problems. And I don't "wash" the yeast.

OkanaganMike said:

I've done a ton of reading here and couldn't find the answer to this question before posting. If it is here already I apologize.
My question is can you harvest your yeast cake after you cold crash and fine with gelatin? Has anyone done this with successful results? Seems to me you don't want that stuff in your trub if your'e trying to harvest it and wonder if it is easily separated with the trub.

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All the time. No problem. Been doing it for years. I use gelatin in almost every beer, and I reuse yeast a LOT. I dump the yeast from a carboy into several pint mason jars, store in fermentation fridge, dump one jar into each carboy for next beer.

passedpawn said:

All the time. No problem. Been doing it for years. I use gelatin in almost every beer, and I reuse yeast a LOT. I dump the yeast from a carboy into several pint mason jars, store in fermentation fridge, dump one jar into each carboy for next beer.

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A whole jar? I presume you are transferring from one jar to another to lose the trub right? I've only tried to harvest once and it was safale 04 I think. Seemed like a lot of work for a very little amount of yeast (after trub removed). Now I've got a couple liquid yeasts, it may be worth revisiting trying it again

OkanaganMike said:

A whole jar? I presume you are transferring from one jar to another to lose the trub right? I've only tried to harvest once and it was safale 04 I think. Seemed like a lot of work for a very little amount of yeast (after trub removed). Now I've got a couple liquid yeasts, it may be worth revisiting trying it again

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I don't remove the trub. All of that goes into the next beer. Of course, I wouldn't put dark trub into a light beer, or hoppy trub into a mild beer.

So, it's less work than than making a starter with liquid yeast, or rehydrating a sachet of dry yeast.

BigEd said:

I suppose you could but IMO you want to harvest earlier to get a larger concentration of more flocculant yeast.

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I've read that doing so will - over generations - select the "lazier" yeast, the ones that give up early, while there are still unfermented sugars remaining in the beer. On the other hand, harvesting the late-flocculating yeast will select for yeast that has a tendency to produce cloudy, hazy beer. The best approach is to let it ferment out completely, settle out all the yeast, and harvest and re-use all the yeast (i.e., a mix of varying properties). That's the only way to ensure you can reproduce the same beer: by using the same yeast (not just a demographic that shows an anomalous trait).

passedpawn said:

I don't remove the trub. All of that goes into the next beer. Of course, I wouldn't put dark trub into a light beer, or hoppy trub into a mild beer.

So, it's less work than than making a starter with liquid yeast, or rehydrating a sachet of dry yeast.

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I do the exact same thing. After racking beer from the carboy, I swirl up what's left and funnel it into 4 mason jars. They get labeled and put in the fridge with the lids loosened 1/8 of a turn, to allow some venting.

The next batch, I just pitch an entire jar. No starter, no washing. The trub was in the old beer, what's wrong with it being in the new beer? Yeast that is more than 2 months old gets discarded. Lagers get 2 jars.

passedpawn said:

I don't remove the trub. All of that goes into the next beer. Of course, I wouldn't put dark trub into a light beer, or hoppy trub into a mild beer.

So, it's less work than than making a starter with liquid yeast, or rehydrating a sachet of dry yeast.

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Wow! Is that right eh? (haha, just saw I wrote that, yeah I'm Canadian, thought I'd leave it in)
How much would you say you have in the jars? 1/2 full, 3/4 full?

I'm all about easy but being a noob with only 8 batches under my belt, I'm still trying to learn all the techniques and performing them verbatim.
Seems like everyone speaks of various yeast strains, starters, pitching rates, separating trub etc etc and you just casually dump a previous jar of whatever into the next with the only consideration is light vs dark? Love it!

How many various beers do you make?

Do you only have light and dark yeast trub the jars?

kombat said:

I do the exact same thing. After racking beer from the carboy, I swirl up what's left and funnel it into 4 mason jars. They get labeled and put in the fridge with the lids loosened 1/8 of a turn, to allow some venting.

The next batch, I just pitch an entire jar. No starter, no washing. The trub was in the old beer, what's wrong with it being in the new beer? Yeast that is more than 2 months old gets discarded. Lagers get 2 jars.

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Dude, I could have written that. Even the loose lids, 2 for lagers, everything. I think I hold onto them for 3 months. They get labeled with blue painters tape. Yeast type, the beer it came out of, and date.

passedpawn said:

Dude, I could have written that. Even the loose lids, 2 for lagers, everything. I think I hold onto them for 3 months. They get labeled with blue painters tape.

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LOL, I use green painter's tape.

OkanaganMike said:

Wow! Is that right eh? (haha, just saw I wrote that, yeah I'm Canadian, thought I'd leave it in)
How much would you say you have in the jars? 1/2 full, 3/4 full?

I'm all about easy but being a noob with only 8 batches under my belt, I'm still trying to learn all the techniques and performing them verbatim.
Seems like everyone speaks of various yeast strains, starters, pitching rates, separating trub etc etc and you just casually dump a previous jar of whatever into the next with the only consideration is light vs dark? Love it!

How many various beers do you make?

Do you only have light and dark yeast trub the jars?

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3/4 full (maybe more). Leave a little room for expansion, and don't completely seal the jar or it will burp and puke the next time you open it.

After you've been brewing for a while, you realize that if you can't simplify some of it, you probably won't keep brewing. Yeast preparation was one place I found I could simplify.

Most of the beers I make use US-05 (pale ales, IPAs, etc). So, the US-05 jars are in regular circulation. I make a brown ale or stout occasionally, with S-04. So, sometimes I'll have saved jars of that, for those. If it's more than a few months old, I'll just grab some new yeast. My store is really close to me.

Over the years I've made nearly every type of beer in the BJCP guidelines. Belgians, sours, smoked, stouts, etc. All of them. I used to use a lot of different yeast styles, so I got into making starters and freezing (with glycerine) small tubes of those styles for later. I ended up with a LOT of different yeast styles, but I lost the desire to keep making all the different beers. So, now I really only need a couple of yeasts for 90% of the beers I make. If I want a wit or similar, I'll just buy the yeast.

I also pour the trub sraight into mason jars. Learning that simple trick was a game changer for me. But I've always been reluctant to use them after ~2 weeks, though lately I've been reading more and more posts about people using them for up to 2-3 months, and that viability doesn't drop nearly as quickly as the online calculators indicate. I'm going to give this a try because if it works it will open up a lot more variety in the types of beers I can brew back-to-back. This could be another game changer for me!

kombat said:

I do the exact same thing. After racking beer from the carboy, I swirl up what's left and funnel it into 4 mason jars. They get labeled and put in the fridge with the lids loosened 1/8 of a turn, to allow some venting.

The next batch, I just pitch an entire jar. No starter, no washing. The trub was in the old beer, what's wrong with it being in the new beer? Yeast that is more than 2 months old gets discarded. Lagers get 2 jars.

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This thread has got a little off topic but man this is a real Eureka moment for me. I'm definitely going to try this. Curious Kombat, do you do pint size jars too? I've mosty got 1 ltr jars but I guess i could fill it a little less.

2nd question - Can you add too much yeast doing this (still trying to figure out pitching rates) and if so, what are the effects?

OkanaganMike said:

Curious Kombat, do you do pint size jars too? I've mosty got 1 ltr jars but I guess i could fill it a little less.

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Yup, they're exactly 1 pint. They're actually the jars that our pasta sauce came in when we buy canned pasta sauce (Classico). After dumping out the pasta sauce, I rinsed the jar really well, then left the jar and lid to soak in Oxyclean overnight, then wash and rinse the next day. Or put them through the dishwasher. Then I dunk them in StarSan, screw the lid on, and store them in my fridge until I need them. By now, I have all I need, so it's been a while since I've added new ones to my collection, but that's where I got the jars I use.

OkanaganMike said:

2nd question - Can you add too much yeast doing this (still trying to figure out pitching rates) and if so, what are the effects?

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Yes, you can definitely add too much yeast. The "proper" pitching rate is 4 billion cells per point of O.G. per 5 gallon batch of ale. Double it for lagers. Using that rule of thumb, say you had a 5 gallon batch of 1.050 wort and you were pitching ale yeast. The "correct" number of cells would be 200 billion.

To pitch the "correct" amount of yeast, you'd have to know the cell density of your slurry, and the viability. Estimates I've seen for yeast slurry cell density range from 1.5 billion cells/mL to 4 billion cells/mL. Assuming the slurry was 100% viable and pure yeast, a "proper" pitch would be between 133 mL and 50 mL. However, without doing a cell count with a microscope, I have no way of knowing how much of my slurry is yeast and how much is trub. Nor do I know what its viability is.

My jars are 1 pint (473 mL), and are usually between 1/2 and 3/4 full of yeast, so I'm pitching between 236 mL and 350 mL of slurry, which is almost certainly an overpitch. However, I estimate that I'm overpitching by at most a factor of 2, which is not very much. Moreover, overpitching has far fewer negative effects than underpitching, so I'd much rather pitch too much than not enough.

The proof is in the pudding, I suppose. My fermentations always take off quickly and reliably, and the resulting beer does not have any off-flavours that suggest stressed yeast, so I'm going to keep doing it this way, knowing that I'm probably overpitching by a moderate amount.

Gotcha and thanks! I'm all about the KISS method when I can get away with it and saving money on yeast is a plus. I think "management" has some of those classico jars in the garage she uses for....???? Well, not sure why she has them but I know I keep moving them when I'm doing stuff in the garage

passedpawn said:

All the time. No problem. Been doing it for years. I use gelatin in almost every beer, and I reuse yeast a LOT. I dump the yeast from a carboy into several pint mason jars, store in fermentation fridge, dump one jar into each carboy for next beer.

Click to expand...

I'm curious about cell counts and lager vs ale yeast. I see you pitch 2 harvested pints into a lager. That makes sense. What if it is harvested lager yeast? Is it treated the same way. Since lagers typically get a higher pitch rate would you expect a higher volume of slurry or a higher cell count in the same volume? Just about to bottle my first pilsner and was going to harvest the 3270 to try a helles. Curious minds want to know.

UncleAvis said:

I'm curious about cell counts and lager vs ale yeast. I see you pitch 2 harvested pints into a lager. That makes sense. What if it is harvested lager yeast? Is it treated the same way. Since lagers typically get a higher pitch rate would you expect a higher volume of slurry or a higher cell count in the same volume? Just about to bottle my first pilsner and was going to harvest the 3270 to try a helles. Curious minds want to know.

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I used to pay close attention to cell counts) I don't anymore. I just pitch as much yeast as I can. So, one pint jar per carboy. For ales, I might split a jar between 2 carboys (I usually brew 25g batch and ferment in four 6.5g carboys).

Regarding lager yeast, I pitched from jars just 10 days ago. The yeast was a mix of Wyeast mexican lager, S189, and W34/70. I used it on a pale ale I expect the lager yeast pints to have the same cell count as the ale pints, but I don't really know for sure. Anyway, I always have quick fermentations, great attenuation, when I pitch like this.

I used to pay close attention to cell counts. I have a nice scope and haemocytometer. See here for proof of my OCD: Pics of Yeast under my new microscope

I think doing the cell count stuff would be interesting, but I paid my microscope dues in college and that's enough for me. I figured you likely treated them the same but it just had me (over)thinking. Thanks for sharing your experience! I've saved slurry from a few batches but haven't actually used any yet. I think I'm a little gun shy to wreck a batch of hard work, my pilsner is tasting good enough to want to try another lager though.