Washing Question

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WrongCoastBrewery

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Ahhhh, yeast washing. I did my first wash yesterday and only had about enough water to fully fill two pint mason jars. I did the wash as close to the "how to" thread as possible. When I looked at them today, this is what I saw. I harvested out of my primary too. Too much trub or lots of yeast?

yeasties.jpg
 
it looks like trub to me...could be picture though, I cannot tell for sure. The trub is going to look dark and gritty (sometimes you can see the old hop particles n etc...)..the yeast is going to look creamy white (beige)...was this in the fridge and for how long? It still looks pretty cloudy which would mean there is still some yeast in suspension. FWIW I have used some harvested pacman with about 50-50 yeast/trub mix in a starter and it still turned out clean (no off tastes) in the batch. So even if you get some yeast in there you can easily step it up in a number of starters (if you use starters)...just leave a like half of the beer, shake it up, wait about 45 mins and it should start separating again...then pour in only the top portion and leave trub behind.
 
It looks to me like you didn't get a good separation when you poured out of the carboy. Did you let it sit in a gallon container for awhile before going to the jars?
 
I'm not sure what you have going on there. When I wash, I always have a perfect horozontal leveling of the yeast.
One thing I have changed up is I eliminated the the 1 gal. jar. Now all I do is boil and cool 1 gal. of water and dump into the bucket and shake. I leave it for 15 minutes. Next, I use a sanitized auto siphon and hold it just under the top of the liquid and put the outlet hose in the santitized pint jar. I pump the siphon very gently to get the flow going filling up the pint jar. After it's full, I quickly move it to the next jar. By adding the 1 gal. of water, I can fill about 8 pint jars. By never moving the bucket and keeping the auto siphon just under the surface, I can get almost all of the yeasty water and zero trub. I clean up the jars with a sanitized sponge, add the boiled hot lids and screw on the rings. The cooling of the frig will suck the lids down to get a decent seal. By the next day, I have a beautiful perfectly level beige layer of yeast.
 
Yeah, I might try to harvest out of the secondary and see what happens. In the mean time, I ordered a vial of yeast from Brewmaster's. BTW, they are absolutely amazing. I will use them from here on out.
 

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