Old-fashioned yeast washing

[loftybrewer]

Greetings! This is my first post and first thread. I am in secondary on my first brew - an oaked IPA - and I am looking at the yeast sediment thinking that I should harvest it. It is right now at around 35 degrees underneath an inch of wort in a concrete cellar. Anyhoo, I was reading threads about yeast washing and I wondered how primitive brewers got and used their yeast. I remember hearing or reading that in Scandinavia, families had their own proprietary yeast strains that lived within their stirring sticks. These sticks were used to stir the wort and it also reintroduced the yeast into the new brew. I was reading Stephen Harrod Buhner's Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers and he writes that Norwegian brewers of old would drop juniper branches into the fermenter with the wild yeast that they caught. The yeast would produce a sediment during fermentation and cover the branches. After drawing off the brew, the branches werepulled out and hung to dry. Then they were simply dropped into the next batch and the cycle began again.

SO the question is: How viable do you think this method of reusing your yeast is? I would welcome any anecdotal, experiential, scientific, intuitive, or spectral analyses that you folks may have. I would post in the wild brew section but I figured they'd be too enthusiastic about it and I'd rather get it straight. What do you think?

 

[Grizzlybrew]

I'm not sure to which method you are referring... Do you want to stir the yeast/wort trub with a porous wooden spoon and set it somewhere? Or do you want to dip tree branches into and then hang them somewhere to dry? If either of these is this case, then you need to post in the wild section with the fanatics. These beers would have been absolutely 'wild'. Also, you have to understand, that it's very likely those Norwegian/Scandinavian beers may have been undrinkable by today's standards - or at least your re-creation of them may be.

If you want to harvest the yeast, there is a very simple, but effective (for a few yeast generations at least) way of rinsing (not washing) the yeast. There's a great pictorial post here:

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f163/yeast-washing-illustrated-41768/

You probably have already seen it. This is the method I would use unless you want to ask those 'other' guys...

I don't mean to poo-poo on your idea. I just think anything other than a sanitary rinsing will yield uncontrollable and possibly unwanted results.

I just went back to review my post before submitting it and another thing came to mind. It seems that these ancient brewing methods would also mean that you were always underpitching... just more food for thought