Revived 22 month old A05 Voyager

[BeerFst]

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

 

[DuncB]

Do you put 200g in 1000ml for your next generation?
Do you give it a blast of oxygen as well?

 

[BeerFst]

Do you put 200g in 1000ml for your next generation?
Do you give it a blast of oxygen as well?

No o2, just depend on the o2 from the spin.

And yeah, if I went to a 2L starter from here I’d do 200 in 1000. Saves the time of crash/decant.

You can really do any volume you want by just calculating total points. It’s easiest to just double it as you double the volume but if you wanted to actually calculate, I typically assume the starter ferments out to 1.010 (which is totally arbitrary).

Then it’s just

Points1 x volume1 = (points2 x volume2) + (points3 x volume3)

If I want 1500ml at 1.040, that’s 60 total points (40x1.5). I have 1L of 1.010 is only 10 points. I need to add 50 points to solution. Since I’m only adding .5L though I need to add 100 points to the 500mL. Since 50g in 500ml is roughly 40 points I need to add 150g dme.

 

[DuncB]

that's brilliant info thank you so much.
Last starter I made just took about 50ml out of the fermentasaurus bowl and added it to the 2.5 litre of wort at 1040. Went crazy and fermenting fantastic.
But your info so good as I also have a couple of old yeasts that will need a bit of TLC to get jump started.
Previously managed to restart a High Pressure lager yeast that was 14 months old.
Where there are cells there is hope.

 

[Brooothru]

I've been playing around with yeast alot lately due to the weather and being a bit laid up (whole other issue). So yeast ranching has allowed me to at least keep my head in the game till conditions improve.

While cleaning out the beer fridge I came across two "lost" and out of date yeast packets, a 12 month out of date WLP-860 Vault Munich lager and a more common (and more expired) WLP-940 Mexican lager. Since the 860 is hard to come by this year and the 940 is pretty common, I decided to start out with the Munich lager Frankenyeasties.

So the entire packet went into 200 ml of 1.020 unhopped wort at room temp. After 4 days of little if any visible activity it got taken for a spin on the stir plate. After two days with some visible bubbles on the surface I added 800 ml 1.040 wort and let it ride on the merry-go-round for a few days. Increasing signs of life were observed. I set it aside to settle for two days, decanted the overburden, and had a solid layer covering the bottom of the flask. Swirled the remains and pitched it into a 2000 ml flask with 1 L fresh 1.040 wort, and took it for a spin. More proof of life. It's now crashing for a few days. I'm anxious to see how much thick slurry I can harvest.

The WLP-940 is in the early stages on 1.020 wort. Time will tell. In the meantime I decided to inventory my frozen yeast samples. They were processed with 70:30 ratio sterile water and glycerol. I found six tubes that were frozen in 2016. Nothing exotic, just some Wyeast 1335 and an original Giga Yeast sample of their Conan when it first was offered. I really don't have any use or plans for either one right now, but since I'm not currently brewing I'm going to play with them and see if these Lazarus yeasts can be revived after 5~6 years in suspended animation. All it's costing me is a little time and a few cans of Propper that are just sitting around.

Brooo Brother

 

[DuncB]

I understood all of it good resuscitation and revitalisation skills, but what is Propper?

 

[Brooothru]

Propper is a premixed sweet wort ~ 1.080 specific gravity. Comes in cans that look like a tall beer. Dump, dilute and throw in some yeast. Instant starter, though at 3 to 4 bucks per can it gets a little pricey. I ran out of home made starter wort and was too lazy to whip up a batch.

Brooo Brother

 

[DuncB]

Don't think that is available here in NZ.
Will have to "stick" to LME or DME.
Have been tempted to use the canning jars we have to make up a homemade as you call it Propper.

 

[Brooothru]

That's what I usually do. I use a pressure canner that gets the pressure up to 1 bar and temp up to 251F/122C for :20 minutes to kill any botulism. My canner holds 7 1L jars, so it takes the better part of a day to make two cases + spares. The good news is I only have to do it once every year to 18 months.

 

[DuncB]

Well that would have stopped me from opening the LME container and finding mould on the surface of it when I was just about to make a starter.

 

[Brooothru]

Things growing in wort, short of yeast, is a real downer. But heating to 122C kills virtually anything that can make a human puke or die, so 'canning' under pressure (even if it's done in a glass jar) that seals airtight in the process is a safe and economical process that be done on a home brewer level.

 

[DuncB]

Yes I wish I had an autoclave for some of the bits of kit I use. Pressure cooker good close second.
I suppose that DME could also get mould but be less visible. The mould could have been yeast for all I knew. They were isolated colonies but wouldn't use it for any brew related purpose.