Yeast Washing Illustrated

[brew2enjoy]

I would normally agree but these little floaties have been there ever since I siphoned out of the fermenter into these jars. I used alot of whole hops in this recipe so I think that's what I'm seeing here. Just wanted to see if anyone else has ever had something similar.

 

[tbel]

Well, you didn't include that bit of info to begin with.
I guess as long as they appear to be unchanged during that time it may be safe. Not sure I'd use it but that's just me.

 

[CthulhuDreaming]

Thanks for doing this excellent write-up on the yeast washing process.

I am left with a question on starters though. It seems that all that I've read on making them is geared towards brewing beer - naturally, the little bit of wort left after decanting isn't going to hurt beer.

What if I wanted to make a starter from my washed yeast for a non-beer fermented beverage (e.g. mead, cider, wine)? Would you use something other than malt extract (e.g. a dextrose solution, etc) to avoid adding any malt flavor to your beverage?

So far, I've used nothing but dried yeast for non-beer recipes, but I've wondered what you'd do should you want to use a starter instead.

 

[Accidic]

I could be mistaken but I was under the impression the malt starter is for the nutrition of the yeast and gets it ready for the job ahead. Nutrient/energizer definitely adds flavor alternatively so I don't see how that would be better than decanting.

 

[CthulhuDreaming]

I could be mistaken but I was under the impression the malt starter is for the nutrition of the yeast and gets it ready for the job ahead. Nutrient/energizer definitely adds flavor alternatively so I don't see how that would be better than decanting.

I may not have been really clear in what I was asking. I'm aware that the liquid from the malt starter gets decanted - but it's going to be nigh impossible to keep all of the malt flavor in the starter out of the product. So what I'm wondering is this - would that small amount of malt contribute unwanted flavors to non-beer product, or should I stop over thinking this and RDWHAHB?

 

[Brewitt]

or should I stop over thinking this and RDWHAHB?

Definitely!

 

[wolverinebrewer]

I may not have been really clear in what I was asking. I'm aware that the liquid from the malt starter gets decanted - but it's going to be nigh impossible to keep all of the malt flavor in the starter out of the product. So what I'm wondering is this - would that small amount of malt contribute unwanted flavors to non-beer product, or should I stop over thinking this and RDWHAHB?

What non-beer product in particular are you thinking of making? The only experience I have in this is making Graham's English Cider located in the cider recipe section. I used washed S-04 and carbed with 1/4 c. brown sugar. I made a normal DME starter which I decanted.
This was made on 9/11/11 so its still a little young but I have tried a couple bottles. It did have that yeasty aroma right when it was opened but I really couldn't taste much. Like apfelwein, its tart and the apple taste is faint but good. I made the mistake of drinking Ed's apfelwein too early but I saved a few that are now at 10 months. It definately gets much better with age and I'm hoping these do too as I'm going to let them sit for another couple of months.

 

[hungry4hops]

How many times can yeast be washed and reused?

 

[Jukas]

How many times can yeast be washed and reused?

Common answer is that yeast shouldn't be reused past 5th generation.

From Earlier in the thread. https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f163/yeast-washing-illustrated-41768/index3.html#post567284

I read somewhere that you should only propagate yeast for four generations. Don't jump on me here, I know some people pay no attention to that, but it's what I read.

Ok, let's say you buy a pack of yeast and make a batch of beer. That's one generation. You wash your yeast and collect four jars of yeast. You could do more, or less, I'm just using four as an example. You make four starters and four batches of beer out of those four jars. That's generation 2. You wash your yeast from the last jar and collect four more jars/batches. That's generation 3. Add four more for generation 4 and you have a total of thirteen batches of beer from the original pack. So that's potentially 65 gallon of beer from one pack of yeast. Or 130 gallons if you're like me and brew mainly ten gallon batches. Of course that's assuming you brew with all those saved yeasts before they go bad; they don't last forever.

 

[Jukas]

I just ran some napkin math and if the beer is your first gen and you get 4 jars of yeast from washing that, and you aggressively wash each subsequent batch into four jars you would end up with

2nd gen 4
3rd gen 16
4th gen 64

Total 84 batches of beer assuming my math is correct. However it's highly unlikely that most homebrewers would be able to make that many batches before the yeast lost viability.

 

[Brewitt]

I'm just washing yeast for the first time. This is a yeast that I recovered from Sculpin IPA that I have been using for quite some time now. I am used to making starters from a small amount of pure yeast I have frozen away but I have also done some freezing of yeast from large starters. After reading this thread I started wondering why I was buying malt extract to brew starters when I could just freeze away washed yeast from a brew. So here I am.

I washed two times with 20 min of settling and have ended up with two layers of sediment. It is clear to me that the smaller, whiter, grainier one on the bottom is trub and the larger, fine, off white one on the top is the yeast. I'm figuring the trub wont hurt me since I'm going to pour off the liquid, resuspend it in about 1 cup of 15% glycerol, break this up into half a dozen samples and freeze it away for future use (see the freezing yeast thread: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f163/d...why-not-farm-yeast-freeze-269488/index10.html). I still make a starter when I thaw them but just overnight like you would for a tube from White Labs.

I'll report back on my success, or lack thereof.

 

[Brewitt]

Well, I used tubes about the same size as a White Lab's vial of yeast. Got 16 of those out of the yeast from 6 gallons of beer. I checked the slurry out in the microscope and see primarily healthy looking yeast, a little bit of trub (irregular blobs), but no obvious living contaminants. Froze them all up. Man, that makes a lot more sense than growing up yeast in wort made from malt extract and freezing away. Thanks for the thread.

 

[flanken]

Great thread! I've got 5.5 gallons of an American IPA fermenting right now, about a week away from bottling, and I'm definitely planning to wash the yeast now.

A couple questions, I've tried searching the thread but couldn't find the answers:

1) Does anyone who washes / saves yeast like what's described here find they need to also make a starter? Seems like you're dumping about 5x's the amount of yeast as what you'd have in a White Labs vial, but maybe the starter is necessary to wake them up?

2) Has anyone put their washed yeast into a cleaned / sanitized White Labs vial instead of mason jars? I realize the volume is much lower, but if you're making a starter anyway it would seem like a good way to re-use leftover vials.

Thanks!

 

[pabloj13]

Great thread! I've got 5.5 gallons of an American IPA fermenting right now, about a week away from bottling, and I'm definitely planning to wash the yeast now.

A couple questions, I've tried searching the thread but couldn't find the answers:

1) Does anyone who washes / saves yeast like what's described here find they need to also make a starter? Seems like you're dumping about 5x's the amount of yeast as what you'd have in a White Labs vial, but maybe the starter is necessary to wake them up?

2) Has anyone put their washed yeast into a cleaned / sanitized White Labs vial instead of mason jars? I realize the volume is much lower, but if you're making a starter anyway it would seem like a good way to re-use leftover vials.

Thanks!

1) Depends on when you plan on using it and the OG of the next batch. I just use MrMalty to tell me how much slurry I need. If I have enough: direct pitch. If I don't: starter.

2) I guess you could cold-crash it in the jar, decant most of the water and pour into a White Labs vial if space is a premium.

 

[Brewitt]

2) Has anyone put their washed yeast into a cleaned / sanitized White Labs vial instead of mason jars? I realize the volume is much lower, but if you're making a starter anyway it would seem like a good way to re-use leftover vials.

Just let your yeast settle out overnight after the last wash and pour off most of the liquor. Then you will have a think slurry that when poured into your WL vial will have about the same number of cells as WL typically provides. With that, you can start an overnight starter into a couple liters of wort and have plenty for a 5 gallon batch of brew. You certainly can use Mr Malty or others for a more accurate estimate of volume but your vial will easily give you two liters or more of high density starter after overnight with shaking or stirring.

 

[bmason1623]

I've noticed that washed belgian witbier yeast takes a long time to settle down to the bottom of the container. I'm assuming that this is due to witbier yeast naturally staying suspended in beer, hence the name witbier or "white beer". Is this a correct assumption on my part?

 

[BW210]

I washed WLB001 California Ale yeast from an APA I brewed. I did it according to the thread and though I achieved pretty good results, I tried using one and it didn't seem to ever activate, so I tried another in a batch of beer bread, again nothing. I have 4 jars left and thinking they are bad, I take one, add to 1 cup of filtered water and feed white table sugar twice a day for 4-5 days, cold crash, decant and repackaged in 1/2 pint jar in the fridge. Looks like just under 1/2" of yeast in middle layer.

This weekend, I warmed up to room temp and started a starter with 1/4 cup DME and 3/4 cup water and boiled, cooled, added the yeast mixture decanted best I could and covered with loose sanitized foil. Action was very slow, but 12 hours later I notice results. I ended up pitching in ready wort after 30 hours.

All I can say is wow... 12 hours later I had to hook up a blow off tube to a bottle of sani solution and the activity is crazy. Still pouring out foam that has filled 1/2 gallon whiskey bottle in a 6 pack cooler... has about 2" in the cooler and bottle is almost full.

So did I overpitch, or is this how fast starters work? My 4th batch and none of the others were even close as the air lock was just fine.

 

[Brewitt]

BW210, Clearly what you did worked but I'm pretty confused by your description. In the first paragraph you seem to be saying that you incubated what I expect is yeast from nearly a gallon of beer in 1 cup of water with nothing but sugar in it for 4-5 days. That amount of yeast should devour the sugar in no time but have none of the other nutrients they need to grow well. In the second paragraph, it seems you started them for 12 hours in about a cup of DME which again provides enough sugar for a very short fermentation for that amount of yeast.

The goal of a starter is to get the yeast growing vigorously at high concentration. The amount of yeast you are harvesting should be able to grow up to a maximum density in 1-2 quarts of wort in 12 to 24 hours. You can either use that directly to start a brew or let it settle and pitch the concentrated cells. In that case I would expect a very quick start and a vigorous fermentation like you describe. It is possible but unlikely that you overpitched give the conditions you described but it is hard to know not knowing the starting gravity and volume of both the brew that you recovered yeast from and the one you are making.

All that said, sounds like you have a great fermentation going.

 

[BW210]

BW210, Clearly what you did worked but I'm pretty confused by your description. In the first paragraph you seem to be saying that you incubated what I expect is yeast from nearly a gallon of beer in 1 cup of water with nothing but sugar in it for 4-5 days. That amount of yeast should devour the sugar in no time but have none of the other nutrients they need to grow well. In the second paragraph, it seems you started them for 12 hours in about a cup of DME which again provides enough sugar for a very short fermentation for that amount of yeast.

The goal of a starter is to get the yeast growing vigorously at high concentration. The amount of yeast you are harvesting should be able to grow up to a maximum density in 1-2 quarts of wort in 12 to 24 hours. You can either use that directly to start a brew or let it settle and pitch the concentrated cells. In that case I would expect a very quick start and a vigorous fermentation like you describe. It is possible but unlikely that you overpitched give the conditions you described but it is hard to know not knowing the starting gravity and volume of both the brew that you recovered yeast from and the one you are making.

All that said, sounds like you have a great fermentation going.

Ya... it sounds kinda confusing. I was trying to describe my process of testing the washed yeast to see if it was viable. I had two attempts to use my washed yeast ( 6 - 1/2 pint jars) and they both failed. So I put a third jar contents in a cup or water in a quart jar with sugar hoping the yeast would eat and multiply. They did and I could clearly see about 1/4" layer of yeast as before I wasn't sure if I saw any from the original wash. I then decanted, shook up the yeast and trudge and repacked back into 1/2 pint jar back in the fridge to wait until this past weekend which I pulled out and started a starter for my brew.

My brew was 5.5 gallon partial boil batch of 8# DME and 5 oz of hops. OG was suppose to be 1.071 and I hit 1.082. Still blowing foam out of the tube and overfilling a bottle in a cooler almost 60 hours later

 

[SkiNuke]

Here is a question I have had difficulty finding the answer to, what is the density of the compacted yeast after it has been in the fridge for a while?

I have been doing a lot of reading and have found barely any information on this and what little I have found is horribly contradictory. I found someone (I think sacchromeyces) saying 1 billion per ml, I also found someone else saying the average in mrmalty (2.5 billion per ml) is appropriate. I also found someone saying that after 2 weeks it should be at a density of at least 4-4.5 billion per ml, and then I vaguely recall someone saying that when white labs yeast is compacted in the vial its 8 billion per ml.

I have just started washing yeast, and am preparing to create a starter. But I need to know how much yeast I am adding to the starter so I can figure out how big I need the starter to be. I don't want to just toss it in and pray, that seems very sketchy to me. What I would like to do is measure, with a ruler, the volume of "the white stuff" and then use a density to find the number of cells I am pitching (I can worry about viability afterwards, that's relatively easy).

 

[cravej]

I always just make the biggest starter that I can, which is about 1400ml in a 2000ml flask.

 

[sfrisby]

I chuckled at people who posted their pictures and asked these question. Well, guess who’s posting now…

Background – I think I do a decent job of getting clean wort into the fermenter. I do full boils, get down to pitching temps in 7-8 min. I drain through a strainer into the carboy.

After I racked yesterday, I thought it all looked pretty clean. So I went through step one and added a gallon of boiled and cooled water to the carboy (1/2 gallon mason plus 4 pint masons), shook well and let it sit 20 min. I then autosiphoned into the 1/2 gallon mason and dumped the rest. In fact, I felt I was dumping a lot of perfect yeast after the 1/2 gallon mason was filled. I let the 1/2 gallon mason sit 20 min. At that point I noticed it all looked the same, no separation so I let it sit another 10 min. It still looked to be settling in one solid layer. At this point I decided to let it sit overnight to be sure. The following is a picture after about 15 hours. I racked 2 beers yesterday, the left is S-04, the right is Notty. I sure believe I am looking at 750-800ml of solid yeast.

I would love your thoughts. Thanks.

 

[bink00]

I just washed some wlp004 for my first time washin'. I used Ball 4 oz Jelly jars though to help save on space in the refrigerator...they also have a little less of the "wtf is that in the frig" from the SWMBO.

 

[Brewitt]

sfrisby, You undoubtedly have a large amount of yeast throughout the material you have sedimented in your bottle. However, I think that the creamy material on the top of the bottle on the right in your picture is a bed of pure yeast on top of a mixture of trub and yeast. I don't think this in any problem at all, but I doubt it is all yeast. When I did this about half to two thirds of the material looked like that layer and when I looked at it in the microscope it had very little other than yeast. I got about 400 mls of packed material from a 6 gallon fermentation.

I presume the ability to separate yeast from trub really depends upon the extent to which the yeast is flocculated. As long as it is clean of other bugs (bacteria and wild yeast) you should be fine.

 

[shoreme]

Any good trick to know
How many burps or secs between burps till I can move to co2?

 

[CPFITNESS]

The whole point of washing the yeast is to separate it from the trub. By mixing the trub with water, the yeast end up back in suspension and the heavier hop particles and other junk settle back to the bottom of the jar. If you carefully pour the liquid off the stuff that's settled, you'll have mostly yeast in the new jar. Wait for a few days and the yeast will fall out of suspension and the bottom of the jar will have a layer of yeast on it.

I'm confused and I tried to search through all these pages on this thread to no avail so hopefully some experienced person won't mind helping me out. In the above statement you say that by mixing the trub with water the heavier hop particles and other junk settle back to the bottom of the jar. Then in the next sentence you say that if you pour the liquid off the stuff thats settled you'll have mostly yeast. That doesn't make sense. So when I see those pictures, I can clearly see stuff has settled but I don't know what the yeast is, the stuff that settled or the stuff on top. I think i saved mostly the stuff on top and now i'm worried that i threw all the yeast out and I'm saving junk!

 

[jonmohno]

It makes sense to me the heavy stuff that falls faster is the trub junk the stuff looser on top is the yeast.Your good.Pour most of the stuff from offthe top of the solid stuff or the cloudy liquid or when washing sometimes ill just pour the liquid if its soon and cloudy still avoiding the solid stuff that is settleing. If that makes sense to you.
Its kind of like your just trying to dilute it and capturing the thinner lighter stuff that falls slower or last(floating more in the top 2/3 of the jar) compared to the heavy trub that quickly settles. By allowing it to settle over a short period of time you then pour off the liquid and thin layer on top of the thicker heavier stuff into another container that fits or that you may have some water in.

 

[sfrisby]

You understand you are saving the liquid, not the particles that settled to the bottom. Right?

 

[CPFITNESS]

You understand you are saving the liquid, not the particles that settled to the bottom. Right?

i guess but i don't understand why people are then saying the stuff on the bottom is the yeast???

 

[erikrocks]

i guess but i don't understand why people are then saying the stuff on the bottom is the yeast???

Originally Posted by IowaStateFan View Post
The whole point of washing the yeast is to separate it from the trub. By mixing the trub with water, the yeast end up back in suspension and the heavier hop particles and other junk settle back to the bottom of the jar. If you carefully pour the liquid off the stuff that's settled, you'll have mostly yeast in the new jar. Wait for a few days and the yeast will fall out of suspension and the bottom of the jar will have a layer of yeast on it.

I think you're getting confused with the statement "pour the liquid off." You're pouring the liquid (on top of the solid bottom layer) into a new jar. Discard the old jar. That's crap. The liquid in the new jar is the yeast. The phrase "pour off" does not mean to discard. It just means to transfer it to a new container--the container you will then keep in your fridge.