YeastCalc and culturing yeast from bottles

[jmf143]

This is a great tool - very intuitive and easy to use. I also like that there are 3 "steps" available for growing starters. As long as you know your initial cell count you can calculate the steps to get you to the total amount you need for your batch. Typical counts for Wyeast and White Labs are 100 billion cells.

That being said, how many yeast cells are there in the dregs of a single bottle? I'm growing Bell's house strain from their Amber Ale.

YeastCalc Yeast Calculator

 

[insurgus]

You should be plating out anything thats alive in the bottle anyways, so you could go from that point. There's no way to know whats still alive in that bottle, if anything.

 

[jmf143]

Let me approach this from a different angle then - assuming there was some amount of living, viable yeast in the bottle what would the number of cells max out at when added to a given amount of wort? In other words, can a small population grow only to a certain size and no larger because at some point they've eaten all their food?

 

[william_shakes_beer]

I think that, in the presence of sufficient oxygen (that is provided by the buffer in the top of the fuill bottle) the yeast will reproduce in an amount sufficient to process the fementable sugars at hand, then go dormant and fall to the bottom of the bottle. As a previous poster said, I suspect it is not possible to find a cell count present at the bottom of a commercially brewed beer. I would buy a 6er of the beer you wish to culture, set them in a frige vertically to drop as much yeast as possible to the bottom of the bottle. Pour off the beer, swirl and pour the remaining dregs from all 6 bottles into a sanitized, cooled container. Then pitch that to your starter wort. There are also references on the yeast producers' web sites that list the culture used by the commercial brewers.