I love me some imperial yeast but since my lhbs closed due to covid I can only get it shipped in, usually from more beer. My preferred “local” is actually in Jersey and they stopped carrying last year (though with the new east coast plant maybe they’ll pick it up again).
Anyway Voyager was last released as the spring seasonal in 2019. I overbuild my starters and store my samples in 150-400ml mason jars in the back of my fridge. I got the hankering to attempt something English so decided I whip up an Americanized bitter with amarillo.
Figured it was a long shot but decided to attempt to revive this 85b cell, 300ml sample from 5/4/2019. I had revived some A24 that was a year old a month ago, and I think my personal best was 15 months.
I always start these long haulers at 500ml and half strength, 1.020 ish (25g dme) That’ll spin for a day or two and it almost never shows signs of life (the A24 did tho). Next step was yesterday morning, I add another 500ml double strength starter (100g dme). This averages out to roughly a normal strength (1.040 ish) 1L starter. 6-7 hours later we had a small sign of life in the center of the vortex (pic 1). Then this morning BOOM, classic giant English krausen has awakened! (Pic 2).
When I do these I arbitrarily start with 3b cells in the brewers friend calculator and so by the very rough math I should be around 175b now. I might step it up one more time. Wasn’t planning to save any, but also wasn’t expecting this performance
Tl;dr - spun up some old yeast. It worked. The yeast viability calcs aren’t perfect. If I had a frozen yeast bank I’d use it but this seems to work just fine so far
Anyway Voyager was last released as the spring seasonal in 2019. I overbuild my starters and store my samples in 150-400ml mason jars in the back of my fridge. I got the hankering to attempt something English so decided I whip up an Americanized bitter with amarillo.
Figured it was a long shot but decided to attempt to revive this 85b cell, 300ml sample from 5/4/2019. I had revived some A24 that was a year old a month ago, and I think my personal best was 15 months.
I always start these long haulers at 500ml and half strength, 1.020 ish (25g dme) That’ll spin for a day or two and it almost never shows signs of life (the A24 did tho). Next step was yesterday morning, I add another 500ml double strength starter (100g dme). This averages out to roughly a normal strength (1.040 ish) 1L starter. 6-7 hours later we had a small sign of life in the center of the vortex (pic 1). Then this morning BOOM, classic giant English krausen has awakened! (Pic 2).
When I do these I arbitrarily start with 3b cells in the brewers friend calculator and so by the very rough math I should be around 175b now. I might step it up one more time. Wasn’t planning to save any, but also wasn’t expecting this performance
Tl;dr - spun up some old yeast. It worked. The yeast viability calcs aren’t perfect. If I had a frozen yeast bank I’d use it but this seems to work just fine so far