yeast washing

ok I hade some time this past weekend and decided to brew-- 3 weekends in a row.. Nice.....
I wanted to try to use the yeast from my last batch last weekend. I siphoned out the beer to the secondary and left about quart of beer in the Primary and mixed it up with the trub that settled. I sanitized a half gallon jug and siphoned the mixed beer and trub into the half gallon jug. I let it sit for 2 hours. Three lays were forming in the jug. The trub was settling to the bottom and the beer was moving to the top. The middle was lighter than the bottom trub so I assumed that was the yeast. Well I took a sanitized turkey bayster and took 6 ounces out of the middle section and put that into my wort. Well I was expecting to see an explosion of bubbles in my air lock 6 hours later but got nothing. So I decided to wait till Morning, and I am glad I did because that air lock was going crazy I could hear the air popping out.
My question is should I have done it this way? Is this a normal way to reuse the yeast? I read the wiki's and it said to pour off a little off the top. For me that would have been just beer.

If you want to wash it and keep it in your fridge for future uses, yes follow what Wiki says, but you're fine doing what you did for the next batch.

how long can I keep it in the fridge?

You'll hear a lot of different opinions about that, some say 1 month, 3 months and you'll hear even some who have had success after 2 years.

In that situation, you should have just pitched on the cake. I mean really all you were doing was adding steps to your process. The extra trub is not going to hurt anything.

However, if you want to wash and store yeast for future use, you would pour the first two layers off into a second container and you could save that, or, what I would recommend, let it settle some more, then transfer it back to the original container (cleaned and sanitized of course) and then chill it. At that point, the yeast will fall out of suspension, you will have very little excess material, and you can pour off most of the remaining liquid and essentially have only yeast.

cubbies said:

However, if you want to wash and store yeast for future use, you would pour the first two layers off into a second container and you could save that, or, what I would recommend, let it settle some more, then transfer it back to the original container (cleaned and sanitized of course) and then chill it. At that point, the yeast will fall out of suspension, you will have very little excess material, and you can pour off most of the remaining liquid and essentially have only yeast.

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That's what I did last time and I got very little yesat? I'm not worried about it, I'll make a big starter again

It does take a couple of go rounds to get used to. My first time, I got only a small amount of yeast too. But with a nice starter it shouldnt really matter anyway. However, you may have let it settle too long. I think that was my problem. You really dont need to wait all that long for it to settle, the heavy stuff will fall out pretty quickly. And if you agitate it lightly every five minutes or so, it will keep the less heavy yeast in suspension while allowing the heavier trub to settle.

cubbies said:

In that situation, you should have just pitched on the cake. I mean really all you were doing was adding steps to your process. The extra trub is not going to hurt anything.

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so you just rack off the primary and immediately (without doing any cleaning/other prep work to the primary fermenter) introduce the new (second batch) cooled wort?

thanks.

You'd technically be WAY overpitching. I don't mind pitching on the previous yeast cake but I take about half of it out first. In fact, you can save half for future use.

thanks, Bobby.

I better do some searching/reading on this, as I want to re-use the yeast cake from my next batch.

Just yesterday i transferred my Irish Red to secondary and figured eh what the hell why not save some money on yeast... So i poured 1/2 a gallon of trub (yes it was actually 1/2 a gallon) and yeast into a sanitized measuring cup and then divided it between several jars... Let this set for too long, shook it up and waited till i saw clear, cloudy, trub layered definitely. I poured off the good liquid into another jar, dumped trub from the first and then poured off the liquid from the others into this...

I got to thinking while i was doing this... There has got to still be yeast that didn't seperate still in the trub... So i poured good water into the trub filled containers and shook it, then let it resettle, and guess what, more yeast did indeed seperate, i figure this is a way to ensure you get the most out of it... I figure several jars, several brews, make a starter and i can keep yeast from one batch going for atleast four, and then atleast 2-4 from the second use, and the same from a third....

At this rate i'll have a dozen jars of Irish Ale yeast, lol...