Pitching onto yeast cake Q's

[nutcase]

Planning on pitching onto a yeast cake for the first time. Usually I have been cold crashing and adding gelatin in the primary and then going straight to keg. Would doing that make the yeast any less viable? I'm specifically wondering whether the gelatin would cause problems in the new fermentation.

 

[Clayton]

no 3456789

 

[Tonedef131]

No it won't...but you would still be better off washing it and measuring out how much you need.

 

[Clayton]

No it won't...but you would still be better off washing it and measuring out how much you need.

how is that! please exsplaine how washing it and risking contamation
is better than just pitching right on the cake????

what i do if the cake is really large is, i put my wort in a new carboy
and just add a cup of water or wort to the old one and very litely squirl
it and dump in to new carboy, the yeast are the last to drop so you dont want to disturb the trub below.

but there is nothing wrong with racking strait on to a cake, infact
every time i make a hefeweizen i dump apple juice on the cake and make a cider.

 

[snailsongs]

how is that! please exsplaine how washing it and risking contamation
is better than just pitching right on the cake????

what i do if the cake is really large is, i put my wort in a new carboy
and just add a cup of water or wort to the old one and very litely squirl
it and dump in to new carboy, the yeast are the last to drop so you dont want to disturb the trub below.

but there is nothing wrong with racking strait on to a cake, infact
every time i make a hefeweizen i dump apple juice on the cake and make a cider.

you are kind of washing it if you're doing it this way. Washing it is better because you remove the leftover crud from the first beer, which can impart flavor onto the second. Measuring is better because you can more accurately pitch the proper amount of yeast, though I think it would be hard to overpitch to the point of harming your beer at this scale. I've pitched directly onto the cake before, and it turned out good, but they were similar styles.

 

[Tonedef131]

how is that! please exsplaine how washing it and risking contamation
is better than just pitching right on the cake????

what i do if the cake is really large is, i put my wort in a new carboy
and just add a cup of water or wort to the old one and very litely squirl
it and dump in to new carboy, the yeast are the last to drop so you dont want to disturb the trub below.

but there is nothing wrong with racking strait on to a cake, infact
every time i make a hefeweizen i dump apple juice on the cake and make a cider.

snailsongs pretty much covered it. I don't get that that concerned about washing, but I think measuring it is a good practice for two reasons. For one pitching right on the cake is a pretty severe overpitch. Second if you pitch on the cake you don't know how much you pitched which makes reproducing the product nearly impossible. If you aren't concerned about either of those then by all means pitch on the cake.