reviving old yeast

[jack_a_roe]

in the process of moving recently i found a vial of white labs 650 brett brux in the back of my fridge. pumped but quickly realized its ~1.5 years old.

anyways, i sparged a bit extra the other brewday for a starter in hopes to revive these guys. that was 2 days ago and still no activity. how long should i wait till i call it?

starter was ~1.015 1L

 

[ph0ngwh0ng]

<insert bad advice here>

 

[Calder]

Don't boost it, You need a low gravity wort for reviving yeast. Brett-B tends to be slow. Also the Brett vials have maybe 20% (I don't know the number, but I know it is low) of the yeast regular sacc vials have. They are made for pitching to secondary, not primary yeasts.

Brett works slower than regular yeast. Give it 7 days, cold crash (whether you see anything or not), drain off the liquid and add to another starter.

I have no doubt there is viable yeast in there. I have saved a part of my Brett b (WLP650) for over 2 years and it revived OK.

 

[WoodlandBrew]

In a vial of WL650 I did some work with a while ago there were about 4 billion cells. I also noted no growth in the first two days. At three days the population had grown by 50%. It wasn't until day 5 that I really saw significant growth. The gravity i used was about 1.020. This was also a brand new vial, so it wouldn't surprise me if it took more than a week for you to see changes.

 

[jack_a_roe]

yea my starter was around 1.024 and i just added water. too lazy to check it after but it had to b under 1.020 a good amount.

ill crash i in a couple days like u said and see where that'll take me. gracias senor.

 

[jack_a_roe]

just to update...the brett totally came back!! however it took me 3 steps to smell the starter and it def got too much O2 or something because it was crazy acidic. so unfortunately i dumped it. would rather spend $7 for a fresh batch and not worry about having such acidity in he final beer. thanks again for the help, great learning experience for me. will surely not b worried about reviving old yeast again!! cheers!