Pitching beer into wort?

[UltraMN]

Thinking of ways to save money on yeast. So far had success pitching a new wort onto an old yeast cake. But I'm trying to get ready for Oktoberfest (at my apartment) and want to get a second carboy going that does not have a yeast cake leftover.

So I was thinking about just cracking open an old bottle of beer (from a prior batch), and pitching it into a new wort. Sounds like it should work in theory.... What do you guys think?

 

[Trox]

Not enough yeast in the bottle to be effective; you will really stress them out and probably produce a lot of off flavors. You could always try creating a small starter with the yeast and see about slowly stepping it up to proper pitching amounts.

A good way to cut down on yeast costs is to create oversize starters and just transfer a bit to a pint sized sanitized mason jar to create your next starter with on the next batch. That is what I am doing with the 3 yeasts that I use quite often; an American, a British, and an Irish strain, if I plan on doing something that I feel needs a different yeast then I'll just pay for it for that batch ( no point keeping a strain that I'll only use once a year at the most).

 

[benm1024]

I would imagine you would be underpitching a lot using this method, but it might make beer in the end.

 

[pricelessbrewing]

You Could pitch a bottle into a starter that you step up but one bottle would be seriously underpitching for 5gal of wort.
What I've done to save yeast money is to harvest my yeast cake into mason jars, and use a calculator to determine pitch rates. Usually 1 packet/vial is the first beer, then that gives me 3-4 new beers.