First Time Yeast Harvester

[BrewingGunner]

This is the first time I've harvested yeast for re use. I have a conical and did a couple of dumps before I harvested so I'm pretty sure it's trub free. Therefore I didn't wash it. Does this look like good yeast?

I think I'll decant off the beer on top prior to pitching and add a little sterilized water to get a slurry.

 

[mikeroche56]

Looks good, just be careful opening it or it will dump out

 

[jflongo]

You don't necessarily have to add water after you decant it. Just leave a small amount of wort after you decant it and mix with that.

 

[itsme6582]

+1 on not adding water after decanting

 

[BrewingGunner]

You don't necessarily have to add water after you decant it. Just leave a small amount of wort after you decant it and mix with that.

First of, thanks everyone! Sorry the pic is upside down. I'll fix that later. That is fermented beer on top of it as I harvested it from the dump valve. Should I still leave a it to mix up the yeast with?

Phew I'm glad it looks good. I was worried with this being my first! I hope to keep brewing with it and perhaps creating a house strain!

 

[Varmintman]

You most likely dumped a bunch of good yeast as well. In my 6 gallon batches after I rack to a secondary I will leave about a cup on beer in the slurry. I then take my pre boiled pint jars and fill them up and toss them in the fridge.

Using this method I can get 4 pint jars per batch easy. But I also am very careful about filtering to my primary and not dry hopping so my yeast comes out pretty clean. There was a vendor on the site here that wrote up a very good article on using slurry. If I can find it again I will post it for you

 

[WoodlandBrew]

The yeast looks great! I wouldn't be afraid to save more. The slurry from a five gallon batch is typically trillions of cells. The number of cells you have can be estimated by the volume of the settled slurry. 1 billion cells per ml is a reasonable estimate in most cases.

Here is some information on yeast storage:
http://woodlandbrew.blogspot.com/2013/01/yeast-storage.html

And here is why not to water wash or rinse your yeast:
http://woodlandbrew.blogspot.com/2013/01/yeast-washing-revisited.html

 

[Tupperwolf]

You must be in Australia!

 

[BassBeer]

Looks like good yeast but you'll want to make a starter to get the cell count up. Or harvest more yeast.

 

[BrewingGunner]

Looks like good yeast but you'll want to make a starter to get the cell count up. Or harvest more yeast.

Yeah, I thought so too. I have 3 jars with that amount. I may even try to get more.

 

[jflongo]

A starter is always a good idea. That is a good amount of yeast though from the looks of it, how much is there about 100ml? If so that is enough for a low gravity beer. But doing at least a 1L starter, that would be enough for quite a few beer types.

 

[WoodlandBrew]

A 1 litter 10°P (1.040) starter will grow about 100 billion cells if inoculated with less than 200 billion.