My yeast bank

[hollywoodbrew]

Adding German bock lager yeast to the bank! Inoculation is not as easy as it looks, the agar is slippery, and slides around when you try to poke it with the loop.

Anyway, that makes two in my collection...WLP833 and WLP802. Life is good.

 

[merkinman]

Enjoy that 833. It is the Ayinger strain, and I liked the results very much.

 

[hollywoodbrew]

Hey merkinman,

I'm looking forward to it in my maibock. My starter is in full swing and it smells crazy, very bready!

What's that "Bread and Milk" brew you have? Is it a cream stout?

 

[merkinman]

What's that "Bread and Milk" brew you have? Is it a cream stout?

no, though that would be a great name for a milk stout. Bread and Milk is a simple cream ale I made from what I had at the house while being snowed-in

 

[JohnMc]

Inoculation is not as easy as it looks, the agar is slippery, and slides around when you try to poke it with the loop.

hollywoodbrew, your tubes are slants, the idea is lots of surface area; just streak the loop around on the surface.
When you poke a loop or needle into the agar, it's called, obviously enough, a 'stab culture.' For those, don't cool the agar on a slant, just have the tubes upright. They're a good way to keep stuff longer than slant, where you intend to only go into them a time or two, because they're even less likely to dry out. They also allow microbiologists to see if a microbe can grow in air or without air all in one tube.
Slants are great for observing the "growth habit" of the strain and easily getting some to inoculate a second culture.
Cheers on the bank.

 

[hollywoodbrew]

Since i'm looking to just keep seeds for future starters, should i be making stabs instead of slants?

 

[brewingkitty]

slants can last over 14 months on the bottom shelf of a 40F fridge. i have 2 each of 5 strains!!

 

[bja]

Since i'm looking to just keep seeds for future starters, should i be making stabs instead of slants?

I do it the way you're doing it and it works fine. I keep 6-8 slants/stabs of 8 different strains. Some of them are well over a year old and they're still fine.

 

[JohnMc]

Since i'm looking to just keep seeds for future starters, should i be making stabs instead of slants?

You're doing fine, my post was just a long winded way of saying don't worry about trying to poke the agar; also, don't worry about stabs. As others have said, they last at least a year.
The streaking on the surface can let you know if you've got contamination or maybe even switched strains around, by how it looks on the surface. Not quite as good as a petri plate, with even more surface area, but good anyway. Plus, it's easier to grab some yeast from a blob of yeast on the top than having to dig into the agar.