Harvested Yeast - what now?
- Thread starter LJvermonster
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Pour off the beer, add boiled and cooled to room temp (deoxygenated) water and shake it up. Let it settle. Pour off the water but pour the upper layer of yeast into another container. Refrigerate til use. Ditch the sludgy bottom stuff. Your IPA will be fabulous.
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You collected 5 pints of slurry! I usually get about 2.5 pints from a 6.5 gallon brew. That's a lot of wasted beer. Also there is yeast in all layers of the sediment.
Purists will tell you to calculate the required yeast cells for a beer and then make a starter..
I used to do that, but found it was just too much effort for relatively no gain. At the end of fermentation a beer will have roughly 6X the recommended yeast for pitching to a similar gravity beer. So factoring some loss over time in the fermenter and delay from when I harvest the yeast, I generally try to pitch roughly a third of a cake into a similar gravity beer if re-using the yeast within a month - no starter, just drain the liquid and pitch. If it is a higher gravity beer I'll pitch maybe a half the cake.
I have straight-pitched yeast after several months without issues. It is not something that I ever plan to do, but sometimes you just got to brew and all you have is an old cake in the fridge. In that case I would pitch the whole cake. Done this a few times, and never had an issue.
Purists will tell you to calculate the required yeast cells for a beer and then make a starter..
I used to do that, but found it was just too much effort for relatively no gain. At the end of fermentation a beer will have roughly 6X the recommended yeast for pitching to a similar gravity beer. So factoring some loss over time in the fermenter and delay from when I harvest the yeast, I generally try to pitch roughly a third of a cake into a similar gravity beer if re-using the yeast within a month - no starter, just drain the liquid and pitch. If it is a higher gravity beer I'll pitch maybe a half the cake.
I have straight-pitched yeast after several months without issues. It is not something that I ever plan to do, but sometimes you just got to brew and all you have is an old cake in the fridge. In that case I would pitch the whole cake. Done this a few times, and never had an issue.
