Reusing Trub

I'm ready to transfer my kolsch from primary to secondary where it will spend 2-3 weeks. When I dumped my brew kettle into the primary, I did a pretty good job on this batch of keeping most of the junk at the bottom out. I used White Labs WL-029 German Ale/Kolsch liquid yeast.

So, there is probably a good 1/2" of sediment at the bottom of this bucket from primary fermentation. I plan on doing another kolsch or two with the same recipe over the next year. Can I just scoop out some of this bottom sediment directly into a sanitized jar filled with water and use that to pitch my next batch? About how much of this stuff (in tablespoons) will I need? I would like to use a bunch of old glass spice jars I have, they are probably about 1/2 cup in size, much smaller than the jars in the yeast cleaning example.

So that is for my future kolsch, identical to the batch I'm harvesting.

I'd also like to do the yeast washing described in the wiki. I would wash in a larger jar and then put into these same small spice jars. Are the spice jars too small for yeast washing? Or should I go with the pints as the example, or does it not matter how much I end up with, as I wll always be able to get the population up later to what is needed?

This is about the size of jar I'm talking about:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0019TWWCK/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20

By the way, why can't I post pictures?

Well, I went to the Mr. Malty site and the yeast calculator there has 87ml of "slurry" necessary to pitch a 5 gallon batch of 1.040. These jars are about 150ml. So, I would need these to be about 3/4 filled, does this sound reasonable?

More like halfway, but yeah that should be fine.

The only issue that I have with that is how do you know how much yeast you have in there? I planned on doing this in the near future, and I was just going to double the amount that was recommended, because I want to be sure that I have enough yeast in there for a nice fermentation. I wouldn't recommend it to you though, just my thoughts.

I pitched a full mason jar of kolsch slurry into my altoberfest. We'll see how it turns out.

Don't bother just saving trub, just wash it. I've found that saving trub acually gets you less yeast cells per jar, because you collect all of those leftover coagulated protiens and grossness along with the yeast you want. When you make your starter you don't want an inflated estimate of how much viable yeast you have.

You can save any amount of the yeast, even far less than what you need. You just need to make a starter about two days before your next brew session.

This will ensure two things:
1. Your yeast are healthy and active
2. You are pitching the correct amount of yeast

What if I could get trub from a brewery? Like, if they were transferring from a fermenter, and weren't going to pitch on the slurry, could I snag a growler of it and pitch it once I got home?

Crazytwoknobs said:

What if I could get trub from a brewery? Like, if they were transferring from a fermenter, and weren't going to pitch on the slurry, could I snag a growler of it and pitch it once I got home?

Click to expand...

I have actually heard about people visiting a brewery and by chance, they were "racking" (I guess tranferring would be more accurate haha) when he arrived. He walked out with a growler full of yeast

devilishprune said:

More like halfway, but yeah that should be fine.

The only issue that I have with that is how do you know how much yeast you have in there? I planned on doing this in the near future, and I was just going to double the amount that was recommended, because I want to be sure that I have enough yeast in there for a nice fermentation. I wouldn't recommend it to you though, just my thoughts.

Click to expand...

The Mr. Malty calculator estimates yeast content by the runniness of the slurry which you can account for in the calculator, after diligent laboratory testing...


"Don't bother just saving trub, just wash it. I've found that saving trub actually gets you less yeast cells per jar, because you collect all of those leftover coagulated protiens and grossness along with the yeast you want. When you make your starter you don't want an inflated estimate of how much viable yeast you have."


The Mr. Malty calculator claims only 10%-25% of the slurry is non-yeast material.


Put your curser over the little sliding triangle and it will give a short discussion of how to use the item being adjusted.

Anyway, looks like about 1/2 cup of slurry will do the job in most cases. My trub is pretty clean, kept most of the boiling crud from getting in.