First time harvesting yeast

Tonight I tried to harvest some west coast ale yeast from my secondary. As far as I can tell everything went well... The one concern I have is that I let it settle out for to long before moving to the mason jars. It sat for about 30min in the beaker. Here are some pics of what came out. Does this look okay or did I mess up by letting all the yeast settle out and end up in the last jar? I also dumped a lot of trub that was on the bottom.

No worries, you can let it sit for a while, no harm done. Looks good, though I'm curious what trub your dumped.

I had a bag of chinook pellets for dry hopping in there and you can see how they settled out... I might be using the word trub incorrectly, I'm still new to the game.

It appears that you may have let it settle a little too long, but I'm sure you'll be fine.

You were right on the trub, If you end up with trub in your final jars, just go to Mr. Malty and use their calculating for repitching from slurryvl and adjust the non-yeast percentage to the higher side.

Very pretty yeast.

Mr Malty has been way off in my experience. Especially the viability by date.
http://woodlandbrew.blogspot.com/2012/11/counting-cells.html

You can get a pretty good approximation based on cell density. Cell counts I have done show 1 billion cells per ml is typical for settled slurry from a fermentor. 2 billion per ml is typical of a starter.

Yeast washing puts 95% of the viable cells down the drain.
http://woodlandbrew.blogspot.com/2013/01/yeast-washing-revisited.html

I've found it better to just store a few mason jars of the slurry.
http://woodlandbrew.blogspot.com/2013/01/yeast-storage.html

In your second picture; the top layer is mostly water (or beer), the second lighter colored layer is yeast, the third dark layer is trub (hops and break material). You should have decanted the water down the drain and poured the yeast layer into the mason jars and topped off with sanitized water. You can either save them like that or shake them up and repeat the process to further clean the yeast.

It looks like what you did was decant just the water into your mason jars?

AnOldUR said:

... the third dark layer is trub (hops and break material)...?

Click to expand...

I agree, that this is hops and break material, but there is also quite a bit of viable yeast in this layer as well.

Thanks for all the info... I believe that I let it settle out for to long and should have mixed it up again. In the third pic of the mason jars I think what happened is I decanted the beer/water mix into the first two jars and then got most of the yeast into the third... Hard to see but it was much cloudier.
So how can I tell the amount of viable yeast in the jar so that I can figure out my starter size for re-pitching?

twbalding said:

So how can I tell the amount of viable yeast in the jar so that I can figure out my starter size for re-pitching?

Click to expand...

Viability by date on the Mr. Malty and the popular calculators derived from it have been way off in my experience. Most of the time viability is near 90%. The largest contributing factor I have seen is alcohol.

I mean to say... How can I figure out how many yeast cells I have in a mason jar? Is there a ball park like 1/2in of yeast cake = 100,000 yeast cells... This way I can determine how big my starter should be... ie 1qt vs 2qt

There are about 1 billion cells per milliliter in a saved slurry which is about 250 billion per cup.