A question on washing and generations

[Ticebain]

I just made myself a stir plate.
I have a batch of wheat beer going right now.
I drink a lot of wheat beer.
so i reuse this yeast whenever possible.

Up until now, I have been using the yeast cake after i take it out of primary to recycle yeast, but since i have a stir plate now, i was thinking of taking a 50ML or so sample of krausen and making myself a starter. then instead of doing a new beer, i was going to throw that extremely active yeast directly into a couple mason jars and a save one jar's worth and make a new starter right away, until i have several (6 or so) mason jars worth of extremely active yeast. throw it in the fridge and use when needed.

that way i am essentially keeping extremely healthy yeast in the reproduction phase and continuing to reproduce them, no real alcohol made during this process

question i have is this. i have heard that yeast become a little, well, retarded after about 3 generations of yeast cake. If i use Krausen yeast, is the same true?

can i make several generations off of one batch of my extremely active starters that i have jarred?

to brew a batch, i intend to take one of my jars and create a starter with it. did i just go 2 generations? or did i just reactivate a batch of yeast in the prime of its life?

Thanks

 

[Cyclman]

All yeast that has gone through fermentation is stressed, higher gravity, hops, trub make it worse.

If you brew often, I would do a large starter, split off half to make the next starter, the other half pitch into the beer. If you did this with great sanitation, you could go many generations without issue.

Ultimately, this is how the yeast producers do it.

 

[LLBeanJ]

+1

Split your starters if you want to have the best shot (aside from slanting) at keeping your yeast from mutating or picking up an infection. It can and will happen eventually, but if you're smart about sanitation, you can go for quite a long time. You'd basically be working with 1st generation yeast indefinitely (or whatever generation you're on when you top crop or wash and then start splitting starters moving forward.

 

[Ticebain]

Ll bean. Great advice and it was what I was hoping. I want to go from. Making 4 wash jars to 2 jars of really viable yeast per batch. Then when I need to use it I'll make another starter with one of the jars to get it really high in cell count. This will let me save so e space in my tiny fridge and prob get more than one type of yeast in storage at a time