What are the benefits of yeast harvesting/washing?

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galacticbrewing12

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I apologize if this sounds incompetent, but after reading some information regarding the benefits of yeast harvesting/washing it seemed like the key benefits were saving money and being able to use the yeast multiple times. After reading about how to do a yeast starter (being that I had always used White Labs or Wyeast that did not require a yeast starter) it seems like the benefit of saving money isn't true. You have to buy a new thing of yeast to activate your dormant yeast that you harvested and some DME to develop your yeast starter. So, it looks like to me you are actually spending more money by having to buy new yeast and DME everytime you need to do a yeast starter. In my opinion it seems just easier to buy new yeast each time I need to brew instead of harvesting my yeast. Please let me know if there is something I am missing or wrong about.
 
No need to buy more yeast. Just put the washed yeast into a starter and it'll take off just fine.
 
Personal preference my friend. Sometimes it is more cost affective to buy new or harvest. You don't have to buy new yeast to activate dormant yeast. That is the purpose of the starter. Fresh yeast is still dormant when using it. By pitching it in or pouring to an appropriate temp for fermenting you can avoid a starter because the yeast will become active as there are fermentable sugars there for yeast digestion. A starter is just a way for a brewer to expand yeast population before before pitching it in to your wort. By expanding your yeast in a starter first it allows for a faster more aggressive fermentation, Because the yeast is more healthy to start off. Yes you can buy dme or lme to put in the starter. Or you can use it out of your wort. Iv even used priming sugar and it has worked well. I dont use priming sugar because i keg. So it is left over when doing a malt extract kit. The faster the fermentation and the healthier the yeast the better quality taste you get out of your beer. But you can make excellent beer by not doing a starter. Oh with harvested yeast you are already starting of with more yeast then if you are to use fresh yeast. The more yeast you start with the less time the yeast takes to expand population, the yeast in turn have less scares and more healthy from division and the faster an active ferment begins. Hope that is some help to your dilemma.
 
I have never harvested yeast myself. Plan to start though. I know there is only a certain period of time you can store in refrigerator, but all you have to do if storing over that period of time is reactivate in a starter, wash and store again.
 
A really good book to look into that has everything you need to know about this is "the complete joy of homebrewing 3rd edition " this book has a lot of information not just on starters but on the whole process of brewing to advance levels
 
I do believe its about 3 months. And then you need to reactivate to get new yeast and then wash and store. You can also freeze yeast to preserve freshness
 
The main reason is price. It knocks off $7 every batch you brew. I know a lot of commercial brewers reuse their yeast as well, but I think that has more to do with convenience for them. I actually just stopped washing and reusing my yeast, because I found it difficult to hit the correct cell count for my beer. I was consistently over pitching my beers, and they were coming out thin. There was a July/August 2012 BYO article on washing yeast talking about scheduling your beers from low intensity flavors to high intensity while repitching, and pretty much spells the whole process. Its a good read:

http://***********/stories/article/indices/58-yeast/2577-second-generation-techniques
 
How long can I leave the harvested yeast in the fridge?
I just brewed a Saison two weeks ago using Wyeast 3711 that I harvested in May. All I did was pitch it into a starter to wake it up. It took my Saison from 1.053 to 1.005 in 7 days. According to my calculations, that's 5 months that the yeast was in the refrigerator.
 
Any suggestions on where to locate a good calculator? Or if anyone has any standard numbers for how much yeast and DME are required for a 5 gallon batch I would be open to help being that this would be the first time I have done a yeast starter from harvested yeast.
 
I use the pitch calculator from mrmalty.com and I don't change any settings....it's close enough for me. Also, when I'm making a starter, I use 100 grams of DME per 1 liter of water. I usually make a 1.5 or 2 liter starter, let it ferment out for 2 days, decant most of the liquid from the top, and pitch the remaining slurry.
 
I wash as well as bank (freeze) yeast. I have around 7 varieties frozen which are good for years and probably around 6 different strains that I use regularly washed. I don't remember the last time I bought new yeast. It's easy to do and I don't know why more people don't do it. When you wash/store your own yeast and buy grain in bulk, AG brewing in large batches (10 gal) is a whole lot cheaper.

beerloaf
 
You can also draw off extra wort from your AG runnings to use in making your next starter

I've filtered the trub from my boil kettle and got a quart or two of good wort for making starters. Just put it in the fridge for the next time you need a starter. I've heard of people doing this and freezing it too.
 
I went with the 4 cups of water and 1 cup of DME and it worked really well. The stout yeast I harvested went to town on the starter and turned out better than I would have expected.

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I used yeast that was refrigerated for a year with a starter. +1 to what Beerloaf said about using starters for 10 gallon batches saves a bunch of money.
 
Weigh your DME. It is much more accurate that measuring by volume which will vary by how densely the DME is packed into the measuring cup.

In addition to harvesting yeast you can freeze yeast. I have heard of people successfully using yeast over a year old. I have some that is now 8-9 months. I will be stretching the year even longer. We'll see. On one yeast I have already made 4 batches from the original vial. I estimate I use around $1-$2 DME for the starter.

Plus I now have on hand 9 different yeasts to use.
 
I just used yeast that I reharvested. This is the first time I have ever done this. I had two mason jars of yeast, each with about three quarters of an inch of yeat in the bottom of the jar. I decanted half of the liquid, then just swirled the yeast around to re-suspend it in the liquid and poured all of the slurry into an pumpkin ale the day before yesterday. After reading this thread I am now worried I put too much. Does it matter? Will they not just simply fall to the bottowm of the bucket? This brew will spend about three to four weeks in a secondary. The airlock was already bubbling only four hours after I pitched the yeast. The next day the airlock had gotten clogged, so I removed it and cleaned it. All is well now and it is bubbling away. So, is there such a thing as putting too much yeast in a brew? What can I do?
 
I just used yeast that I reharvested. This is the first time I have ever done this. I had two mason jars of yeast, each with about three quarters of an inch of yeat in the bottom of the jar. I decanted half of the liquid, then just swirled the yeast around to re-suspend it in the liquid and poured all of the slurry into an pumpkin ale the day before yesterday. After reading this thread I am now worried I put too much. Does it matter? Will they not just simply fall to the bottowm of the bucket? This brew will spend about three to four weeks in a secondary. The airlock was already bubbling only four hours after I pitched the yeast. The next day the airlock had gotten clogged, so I removed it and cleaned it. All is well now and it is bubbling away. So, is there such a thing as putting too much yeast in a brew? What can I do?

Not really any harm in putting too much yeast into your brew. If anything it will eat up the sugars more quickly and probably ferment out a little quicker. I wouldn't worry so much about pitching too much yeast, but more about pitching too little.
 
You're fine dude, over pitching is typically not a big deal, especially with the yeast you would use for such a brew as said pumpkin ale.

That being said, normally it is good practice to still make a small to medium size starter when reusing yeast. This gets you a lot of good yeasts (like I said, over pitching not necessarily a bad thing) AND it helps eliminate off flavors from a previous batch like the BYO article mentioned earlier talks about.
 
The only thing with over pitching yeast which i believe any brewer that's done it before or truly understands yeast is this, yeast is a living organism.. that being said the idea behind harvesting yeast and pitching precisely the right amount is a matter of biology. A brewer wants to maximize the health, productivity, overall condition that the yeast thrive in. By under pitching the yeast spend more fernentable sugars dividing and to up the population of yeast, this can produce of flavors because when a yeast cell divides it creates a little scar, and a yeast divides multiple times, so if there are all these scars the structure of the yeast is comprised for ideal alcohol, and co2 production. Now over pitching us a different story, by over pitching you limiting the growth of a yeast, a yeast grows the same as any living thing and has a life span , its almost as you are starving them because there are too many that need to eat , by over pitching you are crowding the yeast and that affects the quality of them. Over pitching can cause off flavors as well and effect the shelf life.... however there is no wrong way of making beer so long as what cones out on the other end is in fact beer. Everyone does it different and and all have their own methods. The fact though is, as a living organism you should take consideration as to providing the right environment for them to live.
 
Very good input. Thank you all. I wanted to make a starter, but just didn't have the time. I will definitely be doing so from now on. I learn something new about brewing with every batch I do. Two days after I pitched the yeast my airlock got clogged because of the aggressive fermentaion. The bucket lid had swollen out from the pressure by the time I caught it and there was krausen all over the top of the bucket. Those yeast were definitely having a good time in there turning my wort into beer!
 
Hey man thats what we are here for. Try doing a blowoff tube and you can solve the problem with your air lock clogging. That happened to me twice and i didnt catch it in time, the airlock blew off and krowsen foam was everywhere , not to mention it cracked my air lock. A blowoff tube would do you good.
 
I was not at home at the time, but my wife was. I was going to have her make a blow off tube for me, but she didn't really want to take it on. I asked her to keep an eye on it and told her if the airlock became clogged to call me so I could help her get it fixed. I got home to fine it was indeed clogged and about to blow! This is the first brew I have ever done that has actually needed a blowoff tube. I was excited to see all the action going on.
 
(being that I had always used White Labs or Wyeast that did not require a yeast starter) it seems like the benefit of saving money isn't true. You have to buy a new thing of yeast to activate your dormant yeast that you harvested and some DME to develop your yeast starter.

Wyeast and White labs packages will ferment a 5 gallon batch without a starter but neither contain the optimum cell counts for most beers. This is why starters are suggested.

You do not need any new yeast to activate your dormant yeast.

You do need some DME or wort but that costs at most a couple of dollars for your starter.

For a high gravity beer proper pitching rates may require several vials of yeast at $7 -$9 each. Hence, large savings by making starters.


I was not at home at the time, but my wife was. I was going to have her make a blow off tube for me, but she didn't really want to take it on. I asked her to keep an eye on it and told her if the airlock became clogged to call me so I could help her get it fixed. I got home to fine it was indeed clogged and about to blow! This is the first brew I have ever done that has actually needed a blowoff tube. I was excited to see all the action going on.

I suggest using a blow off tube at the start of every batch. You never know when a fermentation is going to go wild. It beats cleaning krausen off the ceiling. BTW I have never had the experience since I read about blow off tubes here before my second batch and use one every time.
 
What nobody is mentioning here is that you don't need to make a starter with harvested yeast if you have enough and it's fresh enough. That not only saves you money, but it saves you time if you don't feel like making a starter. MrMalty.com has a "repitch from slurry" tool that will help you.

Thin slurry is yeast you just harvested that hasn't settled out for a week in the fridge. Thick is settled yeast. in either case the ML recommended is that of the off-white portion in your jar.

The "non-yeast %" refers to how much trub you have in the yeast. If you washed it, there isn't much at all. If you just took the whole cake, you have WAY more than 25% non-yeast. If you just took the runny, liquidy part of the cake, you have closer to the 25% non-yeast.

Of course, you save even MORE money by making a starter from your harvested yeast that you washed down into small jars, each with say 100ML of "pure" yeast in them.

Yeast can be stored for quite some time, but once it goes beyond a few months you'll see the calculator mentioned above recommend more and more yeast. At a certain point you should make a starter and see how much you get from that. Plan ahead with very old yeast.
 
I don't see that anyone here has mentioned it, but if you're really interested in pinching pennies, you can make your starter from the third runnings (or dilute a small portion of your mash+ sparge to get the optimum gravity). This is what I do with my no chill batches. By the time I'm ready to pitch the next day, my yeast are roused up and ready to go.

I have no way to confirm, but I would also guess that the 3-4 hours it takes from when you start your boil to where you are ready to pitch would be enough to awaken the yeast.
 
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