I am wondering if anyone washes yeast with this method...

[djt17]

I just pour leftover yeast into a sanitized jar, seal it & place in the fridge. Then I usually use within 2 weeks the amount of slurry recommended by Mr. Malty. No wash/rinse, no starter

 

[eastoak]

i very rarely was yeast, just pour the slurry into a jar and put it in the fridge. yesterday i pulled a 2 month old jar, scooped out 1/2 cup of slurry and pitched, it was bubbling this morning.

 

[unionrdr]

I'm sure you guys will love this. I didn't boil the water,I just filled my 1 gallon kosher dill jar about 3/4's full of water & added a few ounces of Starsan to it. I let it sit while the yeast/trub jars warmed up. Then washed the trub out. I'm winding up pouring four tostitos jars with about1/4-3/8" of yeast in them into two of the same size jars. I thought to try getting about the same amount of yeast in them as a White Labs vial. So far,no nasties smelled or visible. It def takes a couple hours for about a gallon of yeast/trub/water to settle out.

 

[stratslinger]

I am wondering what the point of washing yeast is in general since Chris White said the risks outweigh the benefits.

Not to be too cynical here, but I think Chris White just might have a vested interest in keeping us buying new yeast vials every time we brew. He's a very smart man, and we can learn a lot from him - but I think we need to take this particular statement with a grain of salt.

 

[McCoy]

Not to be too cynical here, but I think Chris White just might have a vested interest in keeping us buying new yeast vials every time we brew. He's a very smart man, and we can learn a lot from him - but I think we need to take this particular statement with a grain of salt.

The way I interpreted his statement is that it was better to just harvest the yeast without washing it than to wash it. It was somewhat ambiguous. Even if he meant, "You should be new yeast every time," I can understand the sentiment. There is increased risk with reusing yeast, and if I was brewing a beer that would have to sit a long time or cost a lot in ingredients, then I might think twice and buy new yeast.

 

[stratslinger]

My personal experience with it has shown, as long as you use a starter (and you should probably be using a starter with any liquid yeast vial/smackpack anyway), there's really no difference in performance between the fermentation of washed yeast and "new" yeast. On the contrary, for certain generations of washed yeast, the performance is better.

Though now that I re-read what you just wrote, I see I misunderstood - the waiting a long time wasn't due to an expectation of poorly peforming yeast, but probably something high gravity that you'd expect to bulk age for a while? I suppose that comes down to your risk tolerance. I've brewed maybe 6-10 brews with washed yeast so far and only had one failure - but that came down to an issue that had nothing to do with the yeast, and everything to do with me being a bonehead and milling my grain in the same spot that I later aerated my wort, thus allowing the lacto-laced grain dust to settle into my fermenter. Everything else has been spot on, which you might not quite expect, learning curve and all that...

 

[McCoy]

...the waiting a long time wasn't due to an expectation of poorly peforming yeast, but probably something high gravity that you'd expect to bulk age for a while? I suppose that comes down to your risk tolerance. I've brewed maybe 6-10 brews with washed yeast so far and only had one failure - but that came down to an issue that had nothing to do with the yeast, and everything to do with me being a bonehead and milling my grain in the same spot that I later aerated my wort, thus allowing the lacto-laced grain dust to settle into my fermenter. Everything else has been spot on, which you might not quite expect, learning curve and all that...

That's exactly what I meant -- a high gravity (or perhaps a sour) brew that would need aging. I agree, it really comes down to your risk tolerance. Things can go wrong with fresh yeast, too. I personally think that reusing yeast is a small risk, but I can see where some might still think it's unacceptable for a high-value/investment brew.

 

[rexbanner]

I'm sure you guys will love this. I didn't boil the water,I just filled my 1 gallon kosher dill jar about 3/4's full of water & added a few ounces of Starsan to it. I let it sit while the yeast/trub jars warmed up. Then washed the trub out. I'm winding up pouring four tostitos jars with about1/4-3/8" of yeast in them into two of the same size jars. I thought to try getting about the same amount of yeast in them as a White Labs vial. So far,no nasties smelled or visible. It def takes a couple hours for about a gallon of yeast/trub/water to settle out.

Do I understand this right? Just sanitize a jar and dump yeast into it? That's exactly what I did as a homebrewer and pretty much exactly what I do as a pro brewer. Works fine.

 

[unionrdr]

Do I understand this right? Just sanitize a jar and dump yeast into it? That's exactly what I did as a homebrewer and pretty much exactly what I do as a pro brewer. Works fine.

Yeah,I always sanitize the jars. But I didn't have a jar big enough to wash in yet,so I sanitized some Tostitos dip jars & poured the yeast/trub slurry in them & put'em in the fridge. Flash forward about 1 month,& I washed a 1 gallon Vlasic kosher dill jar with PBW & rinsed it out. I sanitized it with Starsan,Poured in 1/2 to some 2/3's full of water with 3-5 ounces of Starsan. I let it sit till the yeast/trub jars warmed up. Swirled them well,& poured into the washing jar of water & Starsan. It's a slow process to settle the trub out of the liquid/yeast column. Re-washed & sanitised the storage jars & poured the yeast/liquid into them sealed up & in the fridge. All's well so far.
I have 2 batches of WL029 yeast/trub mix in the fridge that need washing yet. Just as an experiment,I'll use boiled & cooled water with that one. All other proceedures will be the same. Then we'll know what works/doesn't work.

 

[peterlonz]

Generally I agree with the questioner who asks if the 4 jar procedure cannot be simplified.
Yes it can, & several replies indicate we have some flexibility here.
A few points I think are worth noting:'
1) If you wash you can use tapwater carbon filtered at 0.5 microns, 1.0 microns max.
2) You can omit washing if you wish, & that allows storing under a mixture of beer & traub which works for me although I generally do not hold beyond 3 months.
3) I refrigerate at about 4 Deg C.
4) I often do not use a starter & so far no noticeable difference. This may however relate to time of storage, a starter is "safer" on older samples.
5) For the less fastidious brewer who maybe uses 1.7Kg "brewkits" (I do), yeast is low cost because you get it for no extra cost & it is produced to reliably do the job (and they do almost 100% of the time). So if storing special yeast becomes a logistic or space problem, forget it. For me in Australia controlling (with limited success) my brewing temp is more important!

 

[orangehero]

You should use sterile water...you're introducing a bunch of contaminants in the washing process as it is. The best method would be to pressure cook a few jars of clean water, that way you have sterile water and jars.

 

[Duke_Rogers]

one guy I seen took his whole bucket/carboy, added sterilized water(that has been boiled and cooled) to the whole yeast cake, let it stratify and then pour it into one jar. It's one way to do it

 

[LoloMT7]

I prefer harvesting (and freezing) some vials of yeast from 2L starters made from a fresh, new yeast purchase. I'll end up with 2-4 extra vials which will be good for 2-4 future starters. But this is primarily because I don't brew more than twice a month.

If I brewed more often, I could certainly see dealing with washing yeast and reusing in short order.

I'm with Weezy.. to me it doesn't make much sense to use the yeast in your beer and then have to wash it once it is a generation older. I just make a starter bigger then I need and I fill up a vial with part of it. That way it's like I didn't even use the vial I'd bought

 

[bzwyatt]

Yeast can improve performance in successive generations.

 

[McCoy]

Yeast can improve performance in successive generations.

I've read this is widely agreed upon for a particular sour blend, maybe the Roeselare blend. I wouldn't be surprised if this was true of other yeast as well, particular some Belgian and German strains where stressing the yeast can help bring out the more expressive qualities. Additionally, for high gravity beers I might want use a very large pitch but not have to deal with a large starter so racking onto a yeast cake or a portion of a yeast cake is most convenient.

 

[jfolks]

a lot of no-so-good advice in here (and some good stuff too, to be fair)

listen to Jamil and John Palmer's podcast on yeast washing and storage. It will answer every question in this thread

http://www.thebrewingnetwork.com/shows/543

 

[bzwyatt]

Or read his book, Yeast

 

[Weezy]

Yeast can improve performance in successive generations.

Understood but this isn't really the point. We're talking about the mechanics of yeast harvesting. It's about what purpose the yeast harvesting is serving. I see three cases (there may surely be more, like a plating and a real yeast bank, but these are easy, common, homebrewer methods):
1. brewing a small beer so that you can build up a nice yeast cake for a big beer,
2. washing the post fermentation yeast for repitching in future batches.
3. collecting small portions of yeast harvest from new starters for freezing.

#2 is beneficial to those who brew often and large jars of yeast kept in the fridge won't just go bad from non-use. The downside to #2 is that the longevity of the yeast is directly dependent on the quality of the wash job. And it's a fair bit more work than #3.

#3 is great for people like me who like to keep a couple yeast strains around for months, for the occasional brew session and to save a few bucks. for example, I have a saison strain that I'll use 2-3 times a year, and when the slants are gone I buy a new tube. It's very easy to pull a small portion of yeast, with minimal cleaning effort, from a fresh starter for freezing, then just dump the rest of the starter yeast into the fermenter for the current brew session. I really only need to buy one tube of the few strains I use each year, brewing once or occasionally twice a month.


No disrespect to JZ (cuz I've certainly learned a lot from him and I will be buying the book), but to those of us who listen to the BN, don't you ever get the impression that their ideas are *very* west coast centric. They drone on and on about dry beer and attenuation being king. JZ probably sneezes chico strain. JZ flatly even said he didn't have any really good east coast beer from his recent trip (NHC). East coast beer is generally sweeter than west coast beer. The yalso have a half hearted grudge against midwest and east coast breweries evident whenever top beer lists are brought up, etc. Somehow sweet beer is under attenuation or poor recipe development. A good example of the differentiation is the last Session podcast, with Summit Brewing out of Minnesota. The brewer guest (Damian McConn, classically trained in the UK) had a very nice discussion regarding the benefits of different types of malts, how US malts are highly enzymatic, the benefits of less attenuating and estery yeast, and the delicateness and difficulty of obtaining a quality residual maltiness/sweetness in a beer, especially in the smaller beers common in other parts of the world. There's more than one way to skin a cat and all are correct in their own way and for their own reasons...just like what we're talking about here with yeast washing.

 

[Veedo]

off topic but had to reply. i listen to the BN regularly, and you nailed it weezy. I thought the summit interview was awesome, I am going to listen to it again and try a few of his pointers. one of the brewcasters that seems to not be so much on the dry dry dry bandwagon is tasty!

on the yeast washing, the last few batches of beer we did were all done from the same harvest. we harvested the yeast out of a fresh batch of blonde ale, stored it in a sanitized jar, and just added roughly 80ml of slurry to a 1.5 liter stirred starter. beers turned out good, so it seemed to work well.

 

[andyphil27]

Back to the OP's question. Have you seen this thread? https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f163/yeast-washing-illustrated-revisited-318684/

Down a ways he says "+ You can use jars, tubes, & vials as small as you can get with an extra step of decanting, but leaving a slight bit of water to swirl the yeast around."

So an idea for using less fridge space would be to decant the yeast one more time into smaller jars (some people use 4 oz jelly jars or the preform vials) and store those. This might be better than pouring them all into one container.

 

[SemperFermentis]

Just a quick note from my own personal experience, I usually boil my mason jars that I store my yeast in. The one time that I used Star-San to use an extra jar last minute, it detonated about 5 days later in my fridge. I can't say for sure, but I think what happened is that the Star-San re-energized some of the yeast, and consumed some residual sugars in the wort. To say it was messy is an understatement, and it was a little unsettling to be next to the fridge when it happened. We weren't living in the best neighborhood at the time, and the mind wanders as to what possibly just happened. Thankfully we were not exposed to the shards of glass.

Since then, I make damn sure that the yeast is finished, and I no longer use Star-San to disinfect my jars.

 

[Elysium]

Just a quick note from my own personal experience, I usually boil my mason jars that I store my yeast in. The one time that I used Star-San to use an extra jar last minute, it detonated about 5 days later in my fridge. I can't say for sure, but I think what happened is that the Star-San re-energized some of the yeast, and consumed some residual sugars in the wort. To say it was messy is an understatement, and it was a little unsettling to be next to the fridge when it happened. We weren't living in the best neighborhood at the time, and the mind wanders as to what possibly just happened. Thankfully we were not exposed to the shards of glass.

Since then, I make damn sure that the yeast is finished, and I no longer use Star-San to disinfect my jars.

I use active oxygen and none of my jars has ever exploded.

 

[bja]

I use active oxygen and none of my jars has ever exploded.

I've been using star san for years and never had one explode.

I think what happened is that the Star-San re-energized some of the yeast, and consumed some residual sugars in the wort.

I think you're grabbing at straws here.

 

[SemperFermentis]

I've been using star san for years and never had one explode.



I think you're grabbing at straws here.

Then do you have an explanation then? It seems that I don't. All I know is that the one and only time I used Star-San, I had a detonation.

 

[djt17]

Then do you have an explanation then? It seems that I don't. All I know is that the one and only time I used Star-San, I had a detonation.

I have also used StarSan for years to sanitize my mason jars; never had a "detonation."

 

[bzwyatt]

If starsan or any other sanitizer could 'reactivate' yeast there would be a lot more bottle bombs. It wasn't the sanitizer.

 

[kombat]

I'm another StarSan-sanitizer Mason-jar yeast rancher, never had an explosion.

I've had one infection, and I've had a few build up a little pressure which I vented, but nothing's ever exploded (knock on wood).

 

[Epimetheus]

I got tired of Ball jars in the fridge (OK, it was DW who suggested they depart for elsewhere) and started freezing yeast. A small bottle of glycerine from the Wally World pharmacy and 50ML centrifuge vials. Easy.

 

[SemperFermentis]

If starsan or any other sanitizer could 'reactivate' yeast there would be a lot more bottle bombs. It wasn't the sanitizer.

Maybe 'reactivate' was improper vernacular. It's my understanding that upon dilution Star-San is effectively yeast food. I figured that it allowed fermentation to re-commence. Evidently this is misplaced, and perhaps it just hadn't fully fermented the wort in the starter.

I don't know, but I'm not really getting any other ideas to buy into here. Just a lot of people telling me that I'm wrong.

 

[bja]

I don't know, but I'm not really getting any other ideas to buy into here. Just a lot of people telling me that I'm wrong.

Mason jars and lids are not designed to hold pressure. Under pressure the lid will lift enough to release pressure, unless the ring is tightened to the point that doesn't allow the lid to lift until a dangerously high pressure is reached. This could explain why only one exploded.

Could this be the reason? Possibly, and I can tell you for sure that it was not the Star san.