Worth it to reuse your own yeast?

[Danny2fresh]

Is harvesting and reusing your yeast worth it? If I use white labs hefe yeast, could I take a sample after fermentation and store it in a test tube refrigerated for a few months? If I capture local wild yeast will it always be sour?

The reason i’m asking is because I found a complete yeast kit with microscope for about $50.

 

[Oginme]

Used? If it were new, I would question the quality of the microscope. You really need a good microscope and at least a clean 400x magnification to do cell counts. Check out the blog at http://suigenerisbrewing.com/ for more information on how and what you need.

 

[day_trippr]

Is harvesting and reusing your yeast worth it?

I think so, if you brew enough.

I keep almost a dozen strains going through over-built starters and rarely buy yeast except for a new-to-me strain - eg: the 2565 I bought a month ago for my first Kolsch, another strain I'll keep going. I've done 8 brews of 10 gallons each (some batches split between two different strains) this year so far. If I'd bought yeast packs for all of that it would have been another $100-$150 in costs at least (more with Imperial) and that's if I did starters to bump up cell counts to a good pitch rate. Without starters I'd have had to buy even more yeast...

Cheers!

 

[RM-MN]

Is harvesting and reusing your yeast worth it? If I use white labs hefe yeast, could I take a sample after fermentation and store it in a test tube refrigerated for a few months? If I capture local wild yeast will it always be sour?

The reason i’m asking is because I found a complete yeast kit with microscope for about $50.

I think it is worth reusing yeast but instead of taking the sample after fermentation, make a bigger starter than needed and store some of that in a pint jar. It will take more refrigerator room but you will have more yeast cells surviving so you don't have to make a step-up starter.

 

[eadavis80]

It can save you some buck$, but I guess it depends on how much you brew and you obviously want to make sure the yeast you're saving is going to be compatible with the next batch(es). Sometimes I harvest yeast and never even get around to using it and just pitch it after several months. But sometimes I find it fun just to do brewing related things like harvesting yeast and making starters. My two most recent batches were both made with combinations of harvested 05 and Bry-97.

 

[Danny2fresh]

I brew about every other week

 

[Yooper]

I brew 11 gallon batches, and saving yeast saves me lots of money! I'll start with one package, make a starter, then pitch that into one 5.5 gallon batch. Then I save that yeast cake in a quart mason jar in my fridge, and use it for an 11 gallon batch and so on. I buy yeast about twice per year.
I wouldn't save it in a vial- that's really not much yeast- but a mason jar would work great.

 

[Manufacturedevolution]

I brew at least once each week. Saving yeast slurries has saved me tons of cash. I also only buy yeast once or twice a year.

 

[BrewMan13]

I tried reusing yeast years ago, but ended up dumping batches. I figured $7 or 8 to ensure good fermentation was fine by me. Now, my techniques have drastically improved since then, and feel like if I had the motivation I could keep a yeast bank going (actually have the supplies for it due to my interest in wild yeasts, etc). But for the time I am ok with paying for it as I usually only brew once a month, maybe twice if I'm lucky.

 

[z-bob]

I brew about every other week

Definitely worth it then. I brew once every month or two; I reuse my yeast several times before I don't trust it (actually, don't trust my sanitation) and it's worth it for me. Both in cost savings and satisfaction. And it lets me justify spending $8 or more on a packet of something new if I can reuse it instead of just one shot.

(if I really wanted to save money, I would pick just one good yeast and use it for everything, but I like trying new stuff too much)

 

[kh54s10]

I freeze my yeast. I make a starter larger than needed for the current batch. I then make four 20 ml vials with 5ml yeast 5ml glycerin and 10 ml water. I cool them in the fridge over night. Shake them up and put them in the freezer. I have them in a Styrofoam box with cold packs inside and outside to counteract the defrost cycle. I have used yeast saved for 6 years.

 

[bleme]

If I capture local wild yeast will it always be sour?

To the second part of your question, wild yeast will not always be sour. After all, all of the yeast we use now started off wild. It is very hard to find a 'neutral' wild yeast though. Most of them are more
estery and/or phenolic, sometimes in unpleasant ways, sometimes in amazing ways!

 

[catdaddy66]

I brew about every other week

Then my answer would be...

YES!!!

 

[z-bob]

I freeze my yeast. I make a starter larger than needed for the current batch. I then make four 20 ml vials with 5ml yeast 5ml glycerin and 10 ml water. I cool them in the fridge over night. Shake them up and put them in the freezer. I have them in a Styrofoam box with cold packs inside and outside to counteract the defrost cycle. I have used yeast saved for 6 years.

"Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter." When you revive a vial to make a starter, what size starter do you use? And do you step it up once or twice before pitching?

 

[redllama]

If I capture local wild yeast will it always be sour?

Nope, I have a wild strain from the flower of a magnolia tree in my front yard and it produced a nice belgian type strain. Works great as a base for my sour beers where I can add other blends to create unique profiles

 

[RPh_Guy]

I brew a lot of 1-gal batches, so I try to save liquid yeast strains when I might use it in the next few months. I just pour the cake into jars. Over-building starters is a good idea for larger batches.

If I capture local wild yeast will it always be sour?

To add to what others have said...

Typically yeast do not produce much acid under normal brewing conditions, but rather it is bacteria producing lactic acid in the case of sour beer.
These bacteria are easily inhibited by the use of hops. Therefore it would be pretty rare to get unintentionally sour beer from wild yeast pitched into 15+ IBU wort.

 

[kh54s10]

"Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter." When you revive a vial to make a starter, what size starter do you use? And do you step it up once or twice before pitching?

I start with 250 ml of a 1.025 starter, step that up with .5 liter 1.035 then I consider that a normal package of liquid yeast. I then make a final step of a size appropriate for the beer being fermented.

 

[JohnSand]

I save liquid yeast. Dry yeast is cheap and easy to ship. Liquid yeast can be damaged during shipping by heat or cold. My LHBS is 30 minutes away, but doesn't carry every liquid yeast I want. I generally just save slurry and re-pitch, making a starter if it gets old.

 

[Clef051]

I save mine in mason jars, usually using it till i start to detect off flavors

 

[eric19312]

I brew 15 gallon batches. Making big enough starters is a PITA. A few weeks ago I brewed a low gravity lager. Was only able to get 3 packs of 34/70, built one of those up in a 2 liter starter and still had attenuation issue...1.047 to about 1.016 and it was done after a week at 54 followed by a week at 68...Beers ok but not what I was aiming for. Rebrewed on kegging day, shooting for 1.052 gravity and overshot gravity...1.059 OG yikes... Swirled up bottom of the fermenter and pitched a half gallon of beer+yeast, 90 seconds of oxygen, was at high Krausen in 24 hrs and hit 1.020 in 5 days, bumped temp to 66 over 2 days and at 8 days from pitch I had stable FG about 1.009. There is just no way I could come up with that quantity of yeast building up starters from small overbuilt pitches. I calculated the pitch to be about 25% over pitch for a lager at this gravity.

 

[day_trippr]

So, that would be a "yes"?

Cheers!

 

[Northern_Brewer]

This forum has various stickies on preserving yeast - it’s reasonably straightforward as long as you’re paranoid initially about cleanliness. With experience you’ll know where you can take shortcuts! You don’t need a microscope to repitch, you can guesstimate yeast numbers fairly reliably, but obviously it’s nice to do a count. I would also be sceptical of the microscope in this kit.

Don’t expect to repitch a single batch indefinitely without going back to frozen samples. The typical home brew liquid yeast seems to be good for 8-10 generations before it starts misbehaving, although it is strain dependent. Also blends will drift in time, a particular problem for dry yeasts because many are actually blends - Nottingham for instance.

As mentioned above - the sourness of wild captures generally but not always comes from bacteria that are easy to kill off. Some yeast do produce some acid though. Wild yeast generally suck - poor flocculation, poor alcohol tolerance, lots of off flavours, low attenuation... Brewing yeast are highly domesticated, they are about as similar to wild yeast as domestic cats are to lions.

 

[bleme]

Something about the title just hit me. Maybe we should define 'your own yeast'?

 

[z-bob]

I brewed a 4 gallon batch of beer Saturday with Voss Kveik yeast; my first time to use it. I was going to top-crop it, but the Krausen fell very quickly. So I collected a quart of thick trub and yeast from the bottom of the fermenter instead, and put it in a sanitized Mason jar in the fridge. To maximize my reuse of it (I really like this yeast) should I keep going back to this jar to make 2nd generation starters until it runs out, then collect another jar to make 3rd gen starters, etc?

I should also try drying some, since that's the traditional method.

 

[dstockwell]

I generally just save slurry and re-pitch, making a starter if it gets old.

Same here...

 

[Drewth1]

@z-bob yes that would be the best way to keep the yeast happy as long as you don't contaminate the collection jar. I would buy some pipettes off amazon and sanitize one or two while sanitizing everything else on starter day.
Another idea would be to aliquot the harvested yeast into small sanitized mason jars, maybe 4 oz or so. It would be easier than pipetting a ton of yeast fluid.

 

[Biobrewer]

If you brew enough, have good sanitatary/aseptic technique and the fermentation the yeast was harvested from was healthy and proceeded as you would have expected, there is no reason not to reuse yeast! It's a good way to reduce the cost of a batch, it's the one thing that can be continually reused. If reused enough times, the cost of yeast/bottle is practically nothing.

Just keep it clean and you'll be good!

If you want some tips for technique and process, happy to help out. Feel free to PM me!