culture yeast from homebrew bottle?

[bkov]

Is there any reason you shouldent culture yeast from a naturally carbonated homebrew? I have a few bottles from batches with all different yeast strains, instead of buying more vials, can i just use the yeast from those again?

something like 22oz bottle:
1. open homebrew and pour about 75% of bottle into pint glass, drink

2. fill the rest of the bottle with chilled wort you just brewed

3. Leave the rest of the wort in a sealed sanitized carboy for 24 hours (like a lot of the no-chill people do)

4. 24hours later pour bottle into carboy

 

[Jmiltime]

A couple of issues with this is that it will take you quite some time to step up the amount of yeast in a bottle to the amount you need for pitching. You would need to do multiple starters and will take a number of days. Secondly, the wort that you have chilled is at its most vulnerable place for bacteria to grow. This is one of the reasons chilling quickly and pitching lots of healthy yeast quickly is so important, you want the yeast to start eating up the sugars before bacteria has time to set in and do the same. If you have your wort sitting waiting for your starter you run a pretty large risk (in my opinion) of contaminating your wort.

My suggestion would be to start harvesting your yeast from the bottle about a week ahead of time. Start with about a 100-200ml starter (1.040 gravity) and work up to a liter (500ml, 1000ml). If you are brewing right now, pitch a dry yeast directly and harvest your yeast from the bottle for next time. That's just my opinion though...

Good luck!