Yeast washing

I did a search and followed the yeast washing techniques mentioned here and at wyeast's site for yeast washing. However, I am not sure what I am looking for! I don't have a thin layer of yeast on top of the trub (or maybe that IS the yeast, not trub?) I have two distinct colors, one is this whitish stuff (looks like solids) that take up 50% of a mason jar and the other liquid the color of the beer I just brewed. Where is the yeast? Is it suspended? It has been in the fridge for a day now. After 30 min, it was almost all this whitish stuff and maybe 1/2 of the beer colored liquid. Was I supposed to shake it up after transferring it from my primary to the mason jar?

This post has some pics to get an idea.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showpost.php?p=114104&postcount=56

The top pic although dark shows the middle layer with the yeast(it appears unwashed) with trub at the bottom layer, but by the bottom pics you should end up with the very white yeast if your washing procedures are done right.

I am in a bit of a unique situation, in that I work in a biology lab...I brought my white labs vials in after pitching (there was about 1mL left)...took that and added glycerol to about 20% final concentration and thew them in a -80*C freezer. Every time I brew now, when I want to use one of the yeast strains I have frozen, I use a sterile loop to innoculate 5mL of YPD (yeast extract, peptone, dextrose....typical laboratory yeast media) with some of the freezedown, grow it a day or two until it is cloudy in a 30*C inubator with a shaker, then add that 5mL to 50mL YPD, grow that overnight, then add the 50mL to 1L YPD, grown overnight, spin it all down in a centrifuge, resuspend the pellets in 50mL of the spent YPD, and pitch with that.

Guess I am lucky though...


oh, and I also plan to continue adding to my collection.

What do you all think about streaking from beer onto YPD-agar plates to isolate strains from bottles? I could keep it sterile...would the yeast in the bottle be as viable and usable as the stuff from white labs? It would be cool to make clone beers with the actual yeast from that beer.

Sounds to me like you have a layer of yeast and a layer of liquid (lucky you, I almost always have 3/4 of a mason jar of trub to deal with).

Oops, well I shook the jar again to see if I could get some of the yeast out and above the trub. Maybe you are right that this is mostly yeast. It was very white. Unfortunately, even though I didn't see a new layer of yeast, I dumped some of the contents in another jar and discarded all the rest. So, I now have a 1/4" layer of yeast on the bottom of my new jar! ugh. I guess if you don't know what you are looking for it is difficult to figure out what to do.

Well, it was a learning experience and I will try to re-use this yeast soon to see if it worked. Guess I have to make a starter since I threw most of it out!

ColoradoXJ13 said:

Guess I am lucky though...

Click to expand...

Yes you are!

ColoradoXJ13 said:

What do you all think about streaking from beer onto YPD-agar plates to isolate strains from bottles? I could keep it sterile...would the yeast in the bottle be as viable and usable as the stuff from white labs? It would be cool to make clone beers with the actual yeast from that beer.

Click to expand...

For the most part yes. However; many brewers will use a different yeast to bottle condition their beers than they use for fermentation. This is especially true for yeasts that have a lot of fermentation character or sour beers like many Belgians because there are other micro-fauna in the fermenter, acetobacter, brett etc.