Recycling yeast cake - quick replies please!

[dangloverenator]

Hi there.

Just about to start the boil on my new single-hop Amarillo amber ale.

I want to re-use the yeast cake from my brown ale, so I racked it to secondary while heating up my strike water.

Will the yeast cake be ok after sitting around for 2 hours? It's a plastic fermenting bucket and it has the lid on, but I don't want to risk contamination - would it be safer to use a fresh sachet of dry yeast? I have a S-04 or US-03, but would like to save them if possible.

Thanks!

 

[daryk77]

I wouldn't be worried about it, keep it sealed up and it should be fine.

 

[poley]

Ideally, you'd wash it and only repitch part of it, but you won't ruin your beer if you just rack right onto it.

Yeast Washing Illustrated

 

[Brewsday]

recently I (1) sterilized a standard glass beer pitcher, (2) poured the trub from the primary into the pitcher and covered with sanitized aluminum foil, refridgerated briefly (3) cleaned the primary (4) got my new wort ready, cooled and aerated in the nice clean primary (5) pitched about half the trub into the wort. Voila...great fermentation within about 5 hours. Half or less the added old trub. Before your next batch do a search on "washing yeast"...would allow you to pitch almost no gunk...I mean trub!

 

[TyTanium]

Should be fine. Though I'd dump out ~3/4 of it so you don't over pitch. About 25% of a yeast cake should be a pretty good pitch rate.

 

[dangloverenator]

Thanks everyone! After thinking about it, I'm going with Brewsday's idea of washing and repitching. Until I have enough mason jars and time to work out a proper yeast washing regime, this seems like a good halfway house. I'll let you all know how it goes!

 

[badhabit]

It will be fine as long as you kept it covered and as clean as possible while it sat. The suggestion to not use all is a good one. I take about 1 Cup of the middle part of the slury/trub and add it to my next batch, usally within an hour. I typically get activity in the fermenter within 6 hours. Just make sure to sanitize as much as possible.

 

[DobrePivo]

Last weekend I did my first yeast cake re-use and it had awesome results. I had done starters before, but nothing like this. I chilled my Czech dark lager wort and placed it on top of a Czech Pils cake I had racked off of an hour and a half before. It was about 50 degrees outside and I never removed the bucket lid, just sanitized around the airlock and put the hose in. Had visble airlock activity in 30 minutes and 4" krausen within the hour. Have never had a lager take off like that.