Yeast starter wasted?

[Brewslikeaking]

I made a yeast starter with London ale 3 which is fairly rare these days. Then before I began brewing my heat probe broke on my electric setup so I couldn't brew. How do I save this yeast. I don't have any experience with harvesting or storing yeast. Cheers

 

[d3track]

How big is the starter? How long do you think it will be until you brew?

 

[Qhrumphf]

If your sanitation is on point it'll be fine in the fridge for a while. It'll just lose viability with time, so at a point (when is not agreed upon by experts, viability decrease models are very different) you'd need to make another starter with it build up the viable cells again.

 

[SoCal-Doug]

Split it into two. Refrigerate them. Do another starter in a week or whatever depending on your scheduling with one half. If the starter takes off, great. Refrigerate it, you know you have live yeast that should last a few weeks to a month and a half. If you need more time and can't get any more for sure, leapfrog with the other half. Be OCD with clean and sterile.

Consider this... People heist yeast from bottles that have been sitting on hot store shelves for a year or two. In many cases they find a few live cells they are able to wake up and grow into billions. Your starter should be fine if kept cold and clean.

 

[ba-brewer]

I occasional let starter go a week or so in the fridge without issues.

If is a hard to find strain for you do as socal-doug said, split it in half and leave half for seed to build up later and do a fresh starter for your next brew. I used to over build my starters and set a side close to 100B cells for later starters, it will easily keep for up to 6 months.

 

[flars]

Refrigerate your starter until it is needed. Canning jars work very well. Have the ring on the canning jar just finger tight. This will let any CO2 escape instead of pressurizing the jar. An Erlenmeyer flask works for short term storage also. Just cover the flask with sanitized aluminum foil.

Check out these two yeast starter/pitch rate calculators if your brew date will be more than a few weeks from now.
http://www.brewunited.com/yeast_calculator.php
https://www.brewersfriend.com/yeast-pitch-rate-and-starter-calculator/

Might as well check out harvesting your yeast also. May not need to buy yeast for quite a while if you get into harvesting.
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=163