yeast washing with sodium chlorite

[riderkb]

The brewery where I work a couple days a month didn't have very reliable results with acid washing yeast, so they switched to sodium chlorite instead.

There is an article about it on the Birko website:
http://www.birkocorp.com/brewery/wh...ethod-of-washing-yeast-with-chlorine-dioxide/

One of the nice features of chlorite washing is that you do it when you harvest the yeast, rather than just before pitching. The normal acid wash procedure creates a fairly harsh environment for the yeast, so you really can't do the acid washing days in advance. As soon as the acid goes in, the clock it ticking and you really need to pitch within a few hours. Chlorite, on the other hand, turns to chlorine dioxide and dissipates so that you can keep the yeast in cold storage after treatment.

I got some chlorite on Ebay in a water treatment kit. The instructions in the kit are for killing bacteria in drinking water. The yeast washing procedure is nearly identical, except that you use about 4 times more chlorite. I have used it on one batch of harvested yeast and got a nice quick start and clean fermentation. I've got another jar of treated yeast in the fridge that has been in there for about a month. Every few weeks I replace the wort in the jar and taste the old wort. This morning when I did it the yeast (WLP001) had made pretty good beer - they just ferment very slowly at 10C.

In a minute I'm going to tap into a keg of Pils/Perle SMaSH made with chlorite washed WLP001. The quality control tasting at kegging time was very nice.

 

[SFsorrow]

This is an interesting idea! I may have to play around with this before I have the time to start making slants.
Could you link to the kind of sodium chlorite water treatment kits you mentioned?

 

[warpfactorviii]

So your are washing the yeast with the chlorite then storing it?? I thought I read somewhere that this was only for prior to pitching and not storage.

 

[riderkb]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/MMS-CHLORIN...SOLUTION-WATER-PURIFICATION-KIT-/150674402909

This is the same seller that I used to get my sodium chlorite. I got dry chemicals and mixed them up myself, which is not worth the trouble. Treating 750 mL of yeast slurry takes about 3 drops of 28% chlorite, so the premix bottles with last for many years.

We used the BSI clean & feed kit to get started.
http://www.brewingscience.com/yeast_care.htm#yeast-kit
Now we just get the chemicals from Birko directly and treat all of our yeast at harvest time. It has been the single biggest improvement in the beer quality so far -- I recommend it.

Fair warning, though: if you are chemophobic than this is not for you. I'm kind of on the opposite end of the spectrum.