Yeast Culturing Kit Recommendations?

I found a yeast recently that I am just in love with...Wyeast 1217, West Coast IPA. Since it is seasonal, and I like it so much, I thought about yeast culturing. I did this many years ago with a company that is no longer around, and I really did not find a similar replacement offering out there.

I found this kit on eBay, but not sure if this is what I am looking for. Any suggestions?

Yes, yeast washing may cover me for a batch or more, but it might be nice to rebuild that bank and have what I need readily available all the time with a smaller footprint than a bunch of mason jars taking up fridge space. I already do yeast starters on a stir plate.

If there is a simpler, better solution out there, by all means, point the way. Thanks!

If you are using one yeast fairly often, I would just do a starter. Refill your vial from the starter before pitching the yeast. If you want to keep slants of yeast too, you will need a way to sterilize petri dish/vials such as a pressure canner. A handful of vials, homemade innoculating loop and an alcohol lamp are all cheap.

Could you share what you love about 1272?

It is reportedly the same as WLP 051, btw, which is readily available.

Ah, maybe you meant 1217? If so, could you share what you love about it?

You could use dram vials to freeze yeast or 50ml centrifuge tubes. 1 dram will hold about 10 billion cells. 50ml will hold about 100 billion. Refrigerated yeast lasts months. Frozen yeast last years. If you do decide to freeze you'll probably want to add glycerin which you can get at a drug store near the lotions and moisturizers. For long term storage you'll probably want to sterilize the vials and glycerin in a pressure canner.

You might find this article from BYO on yeast ranching interesting:
http://byo.com/stories/item/1662-yeast-ranching-advanced-homebrewing

stealthfixr said:

I found a yeast recently that I am just in love with...Wyeast 1272, West Coast IPA. Since it is seasonal, and I like it so much, I thought about yeast culturing. I did this many years ago with a company that is no longer around, and I really did not find a similar replacement offering out there.

I found this kit on eBay, but not sure if this is what I am looking for. Any suggestions?

Yes, yeast washing may cover me for a batch or more, but it might be nice to rebuild that bank and have what I need readily available all the time with a smaller footprint than a bunch of mason jars taking up fridge space. I already do yeast starters on a stir plate.

If there is a simpler, better solution out there, by all means, point the way. Thanks!

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That's a pretty nice kit to get you started if you feel that slanting is the way you want to go. I've been slanting yeast for several years now and it has became a near obsession for me. So be careful, you are possibly stepping into a whole new hobby. There are, as mentioned, other methods to store yeast. In my opinion, for the home brewer looking for a continuous supply of a few of their favorite yeast strains, slanting is the best because it is the easiest and most economical way to follow true best lab practices in a home lab. Following best lab practices, you can produce, the highest quality pitches possible and I mean anywhere. Once you brew with fresh lab produced yeast, you will find it hard to go back to using commercially supplied products. On the other hand, if I were more interested in curating (maintaining a large yeast library), freezing may be the best option because of space and perhaps less chance of mutation.

For the kit: I think this is a good start because it's an economical way to try the process out. But keep in mind many of the items are one use and you will have to resupply the consumables. In a way, that's good because there are many options for the supplies you need and after you get the two slants under your belt, you will have a better idea of ways to make your process fit your needs. If you try this and like it, here is a link to a scientific supplier that I use for almost all my needs. They will be able to supply you with more pipets, plates, slant tubes, etc. http://cynmar.com/. I would suggest you request their free catalog. Their search function on the the website is fine if you know what you are looking for. But thumbing through their fairly extensive catalogue will give you new ideas.

The kit does look good but I really wouldn't use it myself. I think you'd be better off building up your own. Morebeer has pretty much all the stuff you'll need. http://www.morebeer.com/category/beer-yeast-culturing-supplies.html.
The kit seems to use Petri dishes a lot which I don't use, so immediately you'll have to buy more tubes to produce slants. I would stick with tubes, less surface area and I would suspect a longer shelf life in the fridge.

You'll need a pressure cooker for sterilising as a start, then I would get some slant tubes, alcohol lamp, inoculating loop, agar, DME. Really that's about all you need, I know some people plate out and pick individual colonies but I don't really think that's necessary. For the seasonal yeast you like I create enough tubes which last me the year. Just use tubes as start, add sterile wort and then step up to larger starter for pitching.

Theres a really good slanting thread worth checking out.

DavidJP said:

You'll need a pressure cooker for sterilising as a start, then I would get some slant tubes, alcohol lamp, inoculating loop, agar, DME. Really that's about all you need, I know some people plate out and pick individual colonies but I don't really think that's necessary. For the seasonal yeast you like I create enough tubes which last me the year. Just use tubes as start, add sterile wort and then step up to larger starter for pitching.

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Hey DavidJP, Please know this post is not intended you discredit your method. I know it is a solid method to produce great pitches. I just want to pitch (pun intended) my method.

It is true that you can skip one step and just use the slants to begin the starter, I have done this with good success. But I really enjoy the process. There are two small issues with this method that could lead to limited effect or perhaps failure of the starter. 1) It can be a challenge to visually identify contamination in a slant (although most of the time it's obvious). 2) Yeast cells die in storage, so starting from a slant means your first step is starting off with less than healthy yeast. As I said, both of these are small issues and may never cause any problems. My thinking is why not streak from the storage slant to a plate to produce pure, clean, healthy colonies and start your propagation from there.

Here's my list of pros:

1) You only need 2 or 3 slants for each strain (1 working slant and 1 or 2 backups)

2) It only takes 5 minutes to set up and streak a plate. (OK and 3 to 4 days incubation)

3) Less worries with contamination (if there is any contamination in the slant it can be seen and sometimes cleaned up on the plate).

4) Consistent growth times between steps

5) The satisfaction that you have produced a world class pitch of yeast

trentm said:

Here's my list of pros:

1) You only need 2 or 3 slants for each strain (1 working slant and 1 or 2 backups)

2) It only takes 5 minutes to set up and streak a plate. (OK and 3 to 4 days incubation)

3) Less worries with contamination (if there is any contamination in the slant it can be seen and sometimes cleaned up on the plate).

4) Consistent growth times between steps

5) The satisfaction that you have produced a world class pitch of yeast

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Yeah i can definitely see the advantages, just having only 1-2 slants stored is quite a good one right there. For me its just another step that would mean more planning but I think you're way is probably better. I'd also worry a little about having the larger exposed surface area of a plate having more chance of contamination where with the top of a slant i can just flame it. I haven't had too many contamination issues at least ones I can see anyway. I do like just putting 6 mls of wort into the slant and leaving overnight, gives me an idea of how vigorous the yeast is before i go for a starter. Last week I did this with an hefe yeast slant that was a yr old and looked a little dodgy and didn't get a great kick off overnight so ended up purchasing a new yeast tube
But yeah maybe I'll do some plating some day, I'm sure thats a more professional approach. But for now I enjoy having a little yeast library and going from slant to pitchable starter in about 3 days.

Do you buy glass petri dishes and re use or the disposables

Certainly both our methods will produce great yeast that will perform far above the yeast we have available to us as homebrewers.

At 25 cents each for the disposable plates, I can't justify the re-usable ones. Maybe I should factor in the environmental costs.

For those of you building up a pitch from a slant or Petri dish: How do you estimate your final cell count? With a hemocytometer, optical density meter, one of the popular online calculators or something else?

You might be interested in this write up too: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f13/guide-making-frozen-yeast-bank-35891/

WoodlandBrew said:

For those of you building up a pitch from a slant or Petri dish: How do you estimate your final cell count? With a hemocytometer, optical density meter, one of the popular online calculators or something else?

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I use a hemocytometer.

I know you are working on an affordable optical density meter. How's that going?

trentm said:

I know you are working on an affordable optical density meter. How's that going?

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It's coming along. There is an update here:
http://www.woodlandbrew.com/2015/01/cell-density-meter-update.html

So as not to get too far off topic l should mention that this is one of the main way our Cell Density Meter is designed to be used.

WoodlandBrew said:

For those of you building up a pitch from a slant or Petri dish: How do you estimate your final cell count? With a hemocytometer, optical density meter, one of the popular online calculators or something else?

Click to expand...

I really don't beyond using beersmith to tell me what size starter size I should be using. I just pitch my slant tube with added wort into the starter and place on a stir plate for usually 2-3 days until the yeast shows signs of reaching full utilizations, sedimenting. Then I usually depending on starter size either refridgerate and decant or just pitch the whole thing, also depends on how flocculant that particular yeast strain is.

I realise doing counts, stepping up starters, picking colonies from plates would probably be a more thorough way to go but my way is pretty simple and seems fairly reliable and results in what I think are good fermentations. I really don't want to get too technical, one of the reasons I went this way was for simplicity and really cost, doing this, buying grain by the sack, hops by the pound and the fact that I rarely brew anything over 1.045 and 30 ibu's means my cost per batch is pretty low with minimal up front investment.

Where is the best place to buy yeast culturing equipment?

Unless you are looking for a chemostat then you can probably find everything you need on Amazon which is where I get just about everything. (and eBay for used equipment) Someone else mentioned cynmar which looks good, but I haven't tried it.