Harvest yeast from bottles?

[petrolSpice]

Instead of dumping the last little bit of beer/yeast/sediment in the bottles, would it be possible to pour it into a refrigerated jar, collecting it from all of the bottles? Would constantly opening and closing the jar potentially cause infection?

 

[Gear101]

The last small amount might be hard, normally people use the first part. That way the person has not been drinking the beer and added any unwanted bacteria or germs into the beer. You could use Starsan to disinfect the beer that you remove from the bottle. And yes anytime you open something like that you have the exposure to infect it with a large number of airborne nastiest.

 

[Zoidberg]

Yes this is possible and yes it could cause infection or mixing with wild yeast so major precautions must be taken. There was an article somewhere on this site that I used as a base when I first did this. Basically I open at least 2 bottles, maybe 3 within a day of each other.

First I spray the bottle caps over with star-san before opening. Then carefully pour the beer leaving more sediment than normal to ensure you don't lose any yeast.

Flame the lip of the bottle with a torch lighter and recap using a sanitized bottle cap. I then make a small starter @ 1.020 for a small amount of sugar to "wake up" the yeast. Swirl and dump sediment from all 3 into the starter.

Give it a couple days and create a regular .5l starter @1.040 and dump entire wake up starter into this container. From here you can store or step up to required starter as neccesary.

I have done this 6 times and one time when I did leave in the 1.020 first starter for more than 2 days it ended up being "infected" with a wild yeast that took any beer made with it to a gravity of 1.006 or lower and gave it a very thin profile and a creamy finish, not bad just not what I wanted.