Idea... Well a proposal to brewing supply companies

[TallDan]

I bought two expired packs once from my LHBS. Half price! I would not have bought, but he didn't have any newer ones of the strain I wanted.

Neither expanded, but I pitched into starter anyway. It was all a big fat fail. I'll never buy yeast older than 1 month again, for ANY price.

Great example of the variability here. I got two packs of expired yeast for free. Both were expired by about a year. I made a starter and made a belgian pale ale with one of them, no trouble with the starter or the fermentation. The other I think i threw away, but I don't remember for sure.

Keep in mind that you're buying a package of BILLIONS of microscopic living organisms here, people. This isn't malted barley, which by comparison is very shelf stable and easy to store.

 

[day_trippr]

Pretty sure nobody missed that. Indeed it's pretty much the driver for the entire thread...

 

[Bobby_M]

I've been running a homebrew store with a heavy ecommerce lean for 5 years now so I can provide some perspective. First and foremost, liquid yeast is the worst product to deal with and there is absolutely no profit in it. You better make it up on other products.

It was my best intentions to manage yeast inventory and drive sales of aging packs by prorating the price. Anything over 3 months old would be discounted by $1 for every month. Well, in reality it would have required a completely scratch-written POS, inventory system, and ecommerce platform. Trying to do it semi-manually is a no go. You'd have to create unique SKUs for every strain by it's package date to jam it into a generic system.

We used to try to keep two SKUs, fresh and aging but I was spending 80% of my times on 20% of the product suite (the one that doesn't make any money anyway). We'd accumulate a bunch of aging discounted yeast and no one wanted it. We even saved the 5+ month old packs and marked them free and every once in a while, someone would take them to grow back up again but sometimes they'd just sit in the fridge forever.

The other challenge is even if you have a 1 month old pack and a 1 week old pack in the fridge, customers will dig and find that one week old one. I get the motivation.

Where we are now is that any pack that hits 4 months goes in the trash.

If you've never thought about this, here are some truths..

A large commercial fridge that people open and close on a regular basis almost never stops running. That ***** draws 14 amps.

Fedex 2-day air shipping costs me about $240 for 140 packs of yeast. That's $1.71 per pack just in shipping.

Even if I were able to sell every pack without spoilage, the shipping and refrigeration costs make it break even at best.

 

[Braufessor]

Can anyone provide a justification to the concept that pitching X number of yeast into Y volume yields a different cell count (Z), than say pitching X/2 into same volume (Y)?

I’m not talking about several orders of magnitude difference in X (as may be seen when propping up bottle dregs), but rather the concern in using a starter vial with 20 billion cells versus the stated 100 billion.

Build of a waste products? Yeast cell division limits? Time? Legitimately interested because it seems counterintuitive to me.

In my experience, chasing a certain yeast cell count is not really the end goal. The more important goal is pitching ACTIVE yeast. A smaller total count of actively fermenting yeast is actually better than a large count of yeast that has a lag time to get going.......This post on AHA really changed how I looked at things in regard to yeast pitching. It is worth the read - there is a lot of great information in it. Pay attention to the posts by S. cerevisiae

https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/forum/index.php?topic=20692.0

This thread too... starting on page 3 or 4 in particular..... https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/forum/index.php?topic=24460.45

 

[MaxStout]

The other challenge is even if you have a 1 month old pack and a 1 week old pack in the fridge, customers will dig and find that one week old one. I get the motivation.

I do that with milk in the grocery store. I get that. People will cherry-pick.

 

[BrewsnBass]

I was told WYeast only sells by the multi pack box so there will always be some sitting around where White labs will sell by a single package.

 

[HTH1975]

I’d rather see the likes of WL and WY invest in dried strains so viability is much less of an issue.

 

[Bobby_M]

I was told WYeast only sells by the multi pack box so there will always be some sitting around where White labs will sell by a single package.

You were told wrong. Singles are orderable.

 

[kh54s10]

I have a couple of thoughts.

If you make the Labs rebate to the retailers how do you balance out them supplying X-LHBS that sells a ton of yeast so very little gets to expiration date. The Y-LHBS that sells very little yeast and most of their yeast approaches expiration date.

If the labs over-pack their yeast so that you end up with the stated number of cells at expiration date, that puts the homebrewer in a situation where they have to try to figure out what the cell count is in between packaging and expiration date.... Or you then end up buying liquid yeast to sit on until expiration date so that you know the cell count. But then again do you??? How was the package treated from packaging until you bought it? Was it really cold at some point - killing cells? Was it hot at some point - killing cells? It is still a guessing game.

All of this, if implemented would either raise the price of liquid yeast dramatically, or dramatically decrease the availability of different strains of yeast.

Especially if you take 50% off the purchase price at 50% of the time left.

You also make the marketing of yeast a nightmare of record keeping for both the lab and the LHBS

The whole idea is unworkable.

 

[ESBrewer]

I have a proposal to professional breweries. Do some more bottle conditioning with your primary fermentation strain. I tend to prefer these companies when buying beer...

 

[Braufessor]

Or, if it is that big of a deal to people.... just simply put something a bit clearer on the package or on the yeast display:

"We put 100 (or 200) Billion viable cells in this package. When fresh, this is an adequate pitch rate for 5 gallons of wort below 1.050 gravity. However, time and improper handling will always gradually decrease the viable cell count. As it is unrealistic for an average home brewer to know the viable cell count of an older, or poorly handled package, we recommend making a starter when using liquid yeast unless you are pitching very fresh yeast into a low gravity beer."

 

[HTH1975]

I have a proposal to professional breweries. Do some more bottle conditioning with your primary fermentation strain. I tend to prefer these companies when buying beer...

The yeast used in primary fermentation does not always make the best yeast to use for bottling purposes. If it’s a powdery type of yeast that is easily disturbed, you’re going to get cloudy beer. A bottling yeast (or something like Nottigham) will stay fixed to the bottom of the bottle.

I understand that you want to grow up the yeast from that bottle, but it’s not really cost effective by the time you figure in the cost of making starters to build up enough viable yeast. Surely just buying a fresh pack of yeast is easier.

 

[ESBrewer]

@HTH1975 I agree, but I'm not brewing cause it is cheap and easy but because it is fun, interesting and sometimes challenging.

 

[Brettomomyces]

I've been running a homebrew store with a heavy ecommerce lean for 5 years now so I can provide some perspective. First and foremost, liquid yeast is the worst product to deal with and there is absolutely no profit in it. You better make it up on other products.

It was my best intentions to manage yeast inventory and drive sales of aging packs by prorating the price. Anything over 3 months old would be discounted by $1 for every month. Well, in reality it would have required a completely scratch-written POS, inventory system, and ecommerce platform. Trying to do it semi-manually is a no go. You'd have to create unique SKUs for every strain by it's package date to jam it into a generic system.

We used to try to keep two SKUs, fresh and aging but I was spending 80% of my times on 20% of the product suite (the one that doesn't make any money anyway). We'd accumulate a bunch of aging discounted yeast and no one wanted it. We even saved the 5+ month old packs and marked them free and every once in a while, someone would take them to grow back up again but sometimes they'd just sit in the fridge forever.

The other challenge is even if you have a 1 month old pack and a 1 week old pack in the fridge, customers will dig and find that one week old one. I get the motivation.

Where we are now is that any pack that hits 4 months goes in the trash.

If you've never thought about this, here are some truths..

A large commercial fridge that people open and close on a regular basis almost never stops running. That ***** draws 14 amps.

Fedex 2-day air shipping costs me about $240 for 140 packs of yeast. That's $1.71 per pack just in shipping.

Even if I were able to sell every pack without spoilage, the shipping and refrigeration costs make it break even at best.

Lots of truth in this post...I work in a homebrew store as well and we try our best to manage an inventory of wyeast, wlp, imperial, omega, giga and a local company inland island for our liquid strains. It is incredibly wasteful. We also used to keep two SKUs but don't really use the expired one anymore for the exact same reasons; it's time consuming and not very helpful for cash flow. We keep a box full of anything over 6 months and allow customers to paw through it for free. Usually makes someone's day and they take it home to make a starter, but doesn't give us any added profit.

I'll also add from my perspective in selling all these different brands, many homebrewers are absolutely stuck on their particular brand/strain. As in we have many people who specifically use wlp001 and won't touch any other brand's chico strain, or the fact that wyeast 3711 outsells every other french saison yeast. I understand there are some small differences between strains and companies, but we carry 4 different liquid Irish ale yeasts yet someone still complained we were out of 1 of 4 last week and decided to wait until our next order arrived in a few days. And at the end of the day, wyeast 1056 and wlp001 still outsell everything else 10 to 1. Mostly we end up wasting packs of lager and Belgian strains that are not very popular but we are expected to stock anyway.

 

[NeoBrew]

I skipped a couple of pages here, forgive me if this was already mentioned. If you wanted to pro-rate the price of yeast based on it's age, the price of a "fresh" strain would go way up. This would be necessary to cover the cost of the handling and sorting of the less profitable fresh yeast. I would have to imagine that the price is currently set at some sort of optimal shelf life, like 2-3 months?

I would be happy if I could just have a way to custom order fresh yeast to my LHBS. I know it is difficult for them to stock what everybody wants/needs. It worries my mail ordering as my climate can go from 90+F in the summer to -20F in the winter. I generally start planning for my next beer a couple weeks out. I would love to be able to put in an order and get a new pack a couple weeks later to pick up at my LHBS where I could count on it getting received and put into a cooler.

I'm currently experimenting to set up my own yeast ranch just because of the difficulty of being able to count on yeast that I buy. For me the thought of loosing a whole brew day because my yeast was not up to par is painful. (Plus it's another thing to learn!)

 

[SoCal-Doug]

My Giga-021 starter (3 month old package) took over three days to show just a slight sign of life. I've come to the conclusion that i'll start slanting and storing again. If I have to do starters anyway, why pay for the yeast. Just bank it

 

[TallDan]

I would be happy if I could just have a way to custom order fresh yeast to my LHBS. I know it is difficult for them to stock what everybody wants/needs. It worries my mail ordering as my climate can go from 90+F in the summer to -20F in the winter. I generally start planning for my next beer a couple weeks out. I would love to be able to put in an order and get a new pack a couple weeks later to pick up at my LHBS where I could count on it getting received and put into a cooler.

Have you asked? Once when I asked for a specific strain they didn’t have in stock, the guy at the LHBS told me that anytime I want something specific, let him know and he’d include it in their next order and have it within a week.

 

[Rodent]

Have you asked? Once when I asked for a specific strain they didn’t have in stock, the guy at the LHBS told me that anytime I want something specific, let him know and he’d include it in their next order and have it within a week.

Same willingness at my LHBS to order anything not stocked and have in a week or so.

 

[JimRausch]

My LHBS hates selling liquid yeast. He says he makes no money on it due to the high shipping costs and massive loss due to old yeast. But he MUST carry it, or lose customers.

My thought is that White / Wyeast should ship direct. They wouldn't have to give the dealers a cut, and use that money to get me 2-day free shipping and some sort of packaging that preserves the yeast for that trip. I don't think there is a way to do it economically though.

Great thought! I always figured LHBS aren't making squat from liquid yeast. Where do they make $? Buying 50 lb sacks of grain and breaking them up into 1 lb allocates. And packaging and selling kits. I get most of my yeast from NB, because my LHBS either doesn't have what I want, or it's pretty old. I'd buy directly from Wyeast if they sold direct.

 

[Bobby_M]

I'll also add from my perspective in selling all these different brands, many homebrewers are absolutely stuck on their particular brand/strain. .

I see this too but I simply won't cave on it. I carry Wyeast and Omega and there is usually a lot of crossover there already. There is more variation in the total process from one batch to another that it would erase any slight variation between labs. Strict adherence to a given lab is dogma and carrying four or five labs extremely similar yeast is just another way to lose even more money.

 

[kh54s10]

I have bought liquid yeast online a few times. I always worry about weather conditions and how the yeast will be handled along the way. At my LHBS I feel they order and get the yeast more quickly than I will, then they care for it as soon as they get it. If I order online, does it sit in a truck at freezing or roasting temperatures. If I am not home when it arrives, how long will it sit on my porch in the sun or (before I moved to FL) sit in freezing temperature. My experience is that I can get at least as fresh at the LHBS and know that it has been handled well. I also know the date on the package before I buy it. Online you won't.

 

[SoCal-Doug]

carrying four or five labs extremely similar yeast is just another way to lose even more money

Absolutely correct. However, you can still lose money on the noobs that are just following a recipe blindly and have absolutely no clue, for example, that WLP001, WY1056, and US05 are the same yeast. They go to order one, don't see it, then go somewhere else. If I owned a shop (retail or online) I would put up a giant list that provides a yeast ID cross-reference.

Once someone's skills and knowledge grow, we get far more picky. For example in my case of preferring Giga-021 over WLP029 or WY2565 (all labeled as Kolsch yeast but very different strains and flavor profiles).

In all fairness, my local LHBS (one of the Morebeer retail stores) carries a huge selection with many duplicates across brands. The guy that runs it has been there 17 years and can help people out, he is a human brewing wiki. Some of the "kids" that part time there are not as skilled. Nice folks, don't get me wrong, but a early twenty something year old doesn't have enough life experience let alone brewing experience to know what they are doing yet. Some small shops don't have that financial or knowledge backing. Sometimes, because of that huge stock, something might get a bit old before it's caught by the staff. No big deal.

 

[Bobby_M]

Absolutely correct. However, you can still lose money on the noobs that are just following a recipe blindly and have absolutely no clue, for example, that WLP001, WY1056, and US05 are the same yeast. They go to order one, don't see it, then go somewhere else. If I owned a shop (retail or online) I would put up a giant list that provides a yeast ID cross-reference.

Once someone's skills and knowledge grow, we get far more picky. For example in my case of preferring Giga-021 over WLP029 or WY2565 (all labeled as Kolsch yeast but very different strains and flavor profiles).

In all fairness, my local LHBS (one of the Morebeer retail stores) carries a huge selection with many duplicates across brands. The guy that runs it has been there 17 years and can help people out, he is a human brewing wiki. Some of the "kids" that part time there are not as skilled. Nice folks, don't get me wrong, but a early twenty something year old doesn't have enough life experience let alone brewing experience to know what they are doing yet. Some small shops don't have that financial or knowledge backing. Sometimes, because of that huge stock, something might get a bit old before it's caught by the staff. No big deal.

I'm okay with that because the same can be said about which maltster's pale malt is on the recipe.

 

[skou]

This topic interests me, in a weird way!

Say I was to buy a smack pack of, let's
say, Wyeast 3068, and want to brew a
few batches of Hefeweisen. (One of my
favorite beers.) or Dunkelweisen, which
use the same yeast.

I get the smack-pack, smack it, and make
a yeast starter with it. And, make 4 more
starters, from that. Ferment 3 of them to
completion, and refrigerate them. Yes, use
one for my next batch, and have 3 more,
under beer, in the refrigerator, to be used
later.

How long will the stored yeast last, and is
this a viable solution.

(Really, Alcohol isn't a problem, it is a
SOLUTION!)

steve

 

[NeoBrew]

Lots of people do this. It is generally called "overbuilding your starter".

A more common variation on it would be to build up your starter so that it has 100B cells more than you need for your beer. Pour that off when it is in suspension and refrigerate that. Then, next time you brew do the same thing. That way you always have yeast on hand and it is fresher than setting 3 extras aside.

I believe that when you build the starter you would consider that "day 0" for the yeast. Depending on how you store it it will loose viability more or less as predicted by the many yeast calculators out there.

 

[SoCal-Doug]

How long will the stored yeast last, and is
this a viable solution

People write books on the answer to this. But... The short answer is every yeast and method is different.

You can reuse (save the yeast from your fermenter). Peoples success ranges from a couple weeks to a few months if kept in the fridge. Room temp is bad on yeast, as is sitting in a fermenter for weeks. Some yeast lasts longer, some die off more quickly. Also, the higher the gravity the beer was, or the hoppier it was, the less viable the yeast cake will be.

You can "rinse" or "acid wash" your yeast after fermentation is complete. Storage time can improve a little bit when doing this, but its more work and involves more aseptic (sterile environment) work load.

When reusing, different yeasts will react/morph differently through multiple generations of reuse. If it's a blended yeast strain, never reuse it, you will never see the same ratios as the 1st generation was. You can either trust someone when they say they got great results through 10 generation, or keep it safe and dont go beyond 3 or 4.

You can also split your new yeast pack and build multiple starters. Maybe start with a 100ml or 200ml starter, then restart that at 1L or 2L. The starters will last as above.

You can go full potato and "slant" or "plate" your yeast. Storage can last a year (two if properly frozen with mineral oil or glycerin). More lab type supplies needed, very aseptic environment and practices, and to make use of your "yeast bank", you'll need 2 or 3 starter cycles (1 to 1.5 weeks) to build the culture back up to a pitch quantity of cells. This is what i've been doing off and on, with great success. Once I realized that a starter should pretty much be done anytime you want to guarantee yeast viability (or prove it dead before pitching), I figured slanting wouldn't be much more work. You can literally get hundreds of batches from a single yeast package and its all essentially "1st generation" (not reused from brewing)

Google all the terms above and keep in mind that no single video, opinion, or website is scripture. Find multiple sources for the information and interpolate as you deem proper.

 

[kh54s10]

I have a frozen yeast bank. 25% yeast, 25% glycerin and 50% water. I have successfully revived yeast stored for 6 years. Not sure if it changed, but I did get a very good beer with the yeast.

 

[SoCal-Doug]

Yup. I banked yeast years ago. After this nonsense, i've ordered some supplies and am going to start banking again. Made up 25 agar malt slants tonight.

That Giga-021 I mentioned in the O/P took many days to rejuvenate. At 3 months and whatever happened to it during that time, kicked its a$$. I let it settle out after it slowed down, poured off the old wort, put another 2L of fresh wort back in. It was chewing through the new food like a fat kid at a Twinkie festival, within a couple hours.

Lesson learned. Slant it! That $16 package of near dead yeast is going to get me a couple hundred batches.