Wyeast Irish

I plan on brewing a stout and an Irish Red within a week or two of each other. Rather than buying two propogators I was wondering if I could rack the stout into the secondary leaving the yeast behind in the primary container and then put the Irish Red wort into the same primary container. If i do this, how would I store the yeast if I don't brew the Red the same day I rack the stout?

 

Either look into yeast washing and harvesting, or simply pour a cup or so of the slurry into a sanitized jar and keep it cold for a week.

Check http://www.mrmalty.com/calc/calc.html for the amount of slurry to use.

 

Personaly, I would brew the red first as the stout may leave some residual flavors (may not, too). I agree with what BioBeing said, but if you can wait to rack the day you brew you have less risk of infection or spoilage due to any improper handling of the yeast.

 

If you don't need the fermenter I would just leave the yeast cake in the bottom and put an airlock on it until you brew your second beer.

 

As long as you leave a layer of beer over the yeast it will sit just fine for a week or so but I would not go any longer than that without washing and refrigerating the yeast cake.

 

Thanks for the tips. I've read through half of the sticky thread on washing yeast. I think I'll try that.

 

I actually did the exact same thing you did about 8 months ago.

I brewed a Dry Irish Stout and then basically pitched the wort of an irish red right over the entire yeast cake. It really took off and created some pretty intense esters. In fact, the esters were kinda too strong and it made me feel like I should have dumped some of the cake prior to pitching the wort.

In the end the red ale didn't take on any type of roasty stout character at all. I think I was able to drain off a fair bit of the stout so that it really didn't have much influence on the red. Try to keep your temps low, those esters can be a bit overpowering.

 

Keeping the temp low is critical, the vigorous fermentation will make the temp shoot up fast. I've done it w/o issues just make sure to keep the temps down. For a yeast cake low is 60-62 for the first few days, at least in my case.