Harvesting yeast - where's the yeast?

Once I get this decanted into a mason jar, I'll use the 1G carboy to make a starter for the two batches of Rapier Wit. Any suggestions on the better type of DME to use? The only slurry from that should be still usable straight into the wort for the Rapier. I want to try doing this both ways, repitch slurry, AND making a larger starter from a smack pack.

Need to go see the friendly little calculator now......
 
Check out Marshall Schott's Brulosophy podcast. I wanna say he did a show just recently...past couple months maybe on yeast harvesting and talked at about 5 different methods....sorry but I am just feeling too lazy to fetch the link....

I recall learning that we typically call "washing" is really "rinsing" as washing involves acid as opposed to using sterile water. So far all the yeast harvesting that I have done is to repitch slurry which is a really amazing leap of faith. I got 4 batches out of a packet of A44 where I kept creeping up a darker brew with each reuse. One thing he recommends is to not use slurry from a batch that was overly hopped or one that had a super high ABV.
 
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Yeah you can pitch some of that slurry saved in the mason jar no starter needed unless it's a month or two old.

The yeast calculator on this site will tell you how much I go by 500,000 /ml so half the pure pitch.
 
Ward Chillington said:
Check out Marshall Schott's Brulosophy podcast. I wanna say he did a show just recently...past couple months maybe on yeast harvesting and talked at about 5 different methods....sorry but I am just feeling too lazy to fetch the link....

I recall learning that we typically call "washing" is really "rinsing" as washing involves acid as opposed to using sterile water. So far all the yeast harvesting that I have done is to repitch slurry with is a really amazing leap of faith. I got 4 batches out of a packet of A44 where I kept creeping up a darker brew with each reuse. One thing he recommends is to not use slurry from a batch that was overly hopped or one that had a super high ABV.
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Yeah, I read the same thing too. Kills off the weaker cells with the acid washing, and leaves some electrolytes that promote new cell growth.

Silly me completely forgot I had an auto-siphon that came with that 1G carboy. Talk about a quick way to pull off the preferred liquid..... All the colors in this were completely opposite of what I've seen in all the pictures. The trub was the lightest color, with a dark band between that and the yeastie beasties. Followed what I saw in the vid, and pulled off the stuff between the foam on top, and the first visible layer. Might have gotten a little stir or two, but cleaned up nicely. In the fridge now. Let's see what happens, whether I get good clean yeast, or a new life form.
 
I still have some yeast nutrient left over from a mead debacle that I tried. That turned out VERY badly. Reasonably certain it was a sanitation issue more than anything else, because it was supposed to be a "no-boil" recipe. That might work with PURE bee barf, but not with the corn syrup laced crap sold in most grocery stores. Hard to find good pure honey these days. If it goes to sugar sitting in the cabinet, it ain't pure honey. I've been stung enough robbing hives to know the stuff when I see it.

Not sure anything actually fermented before the fruit rotted and ruined the wort made from honey. That was an expensive lesson with nearly 8 pounds of honey in it. Takes a LOT of honey to make mead, so I put up roadblock signs on that detour for a while. At least until I understand the whole process a bit better. We were trying to make a pear flavored mead, and a blueberry/pear. NEITHER turned out well at all. Made some REALLY potent vinegar, though, and it smelled REALLY bad. Used it to clean some cement dust off my truck. Just kidding, but it would probably have worked very well for that purpose. Sure wasn't drinkable.

I love honey, and am thinking about a beer recipe with some honey adjuncts to see how I like that. Need to thumb through the recipes on here and see what I can find.
 
Trialben said:
Yeah you can pitch some of that slurry saved in the mason jar no starter needed unless it's a month or two old.

The yeast calculator on this site will tell you how much I go by 500,000 /ml so half the pure pitch.
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That's the MFG Recommended 0.5 pitch?

So, if I overpitch, and the brew was supposed to have some malt left, that would have to be from non-fermentable malts/sugars? Still deciphering the differences in fermentable versus non-fermentable malts (other than the very painfully obvious). I ran the recipe for the one I bottled today through the recipe manager. Numbers came out real close without using a single measuring stick. Someone did their home work on that one. Gotta look at the Hops calculator too. The recipes I get from my distributor typically have the bittering hops measured in AAU and the flavor/aroma hops in oz. Thanks for even more confusion, considering one recipe I do uses the same exact hops in exactly the same quantities for bittering, flavor and aroma stages. Haven't spent enough time with all the conversions yet.

How do I start monkeying with stuff if I have no idea what good substitutes are? Just count on making a barrel of swill that the winos downtown would turn their noses up at? Some of the grains and malts I use aren't in the list. I picked some that were pretty close sounding and got away with it. I was pretty impressed with how well the calculators matched up with the specs on the recipe. Someone did their homework on the calculators.
 
If you're worried about how much yeast you use just toss the whole thing in and call it done. It's technically possible to overpitch but it's rather unlikely to be a concern.

Anything fermentable will ferment whether you under or overpitch, so if you mean malt flavour you don't need to worry about that.

If you google X hop substitute that will honestly get you close enough for just about anything else. You would have to do something very wrong to get Wino Swill.

For grains I use this and it's worked quite well for me. https://www.brew.is/files/malt.html

Every maltster is going to have a different naming convention, and well you just do the best you can.

Don't stress to hard about it, you're going to make beer and every time it will make a little bit more sense.
 
Pour off some of the liquid, the rest of yhe slurry put into a jar that fits into the fridge. Many use mason jars.

Then pitch it into your next batch (it is good for weeks if not months). The recipe tool has a yeast calculator, and one option is 'slurry'. I'd guess 300-400 ml (maybe a cup?) for a 5 gallon batch, but overpitching is not a problem. Just remember this yeast really needs aerated wort. Splash it around a bit or use an air or oxygen wand.
 
I'm assuming Ben's 500,000 / ml isn't pitch rate, but the amount of yeast in the slurry. If you use the yeast pitch rate and starter calculator here, and change the Yeast Type to Slurry you get slurry amount and slurry density fields. If you set slurry density to 0.5 it will give you an estimate of how much slurry to pitch. It's worth doing if you're pitching slurry as it's pretty easy to overpitch. Depending on the yeast the overpitch may give you a beer that's missing some of the aromas you want.

There's two other things probably worth mentioning. The commercial yeast people will tell you that you need to reuse your slurry within two weeks. The reality is that it's not that time critical. The longer you go, the more you want to start decreasing that slurry density. Then sometime after a few months you probably want to think about making a starter out of your slurry.

And to address the problem of not enough yeast in a liquid yeast pack as well as the washing/rinsing side of things, with your next yeast pack you can build a starter that has too many cells. Then you only add as much of the starter as the batch needs and keep the rest of the starter for your next batch.
 
Mark Farrall said:
And to address the problem of not enough yeast in a liquid yeast pack as well as the washing/rinsing side of things, with your next yeast pack you can build a starter that has too many cells. Then you only add as much of the starter as the batch needs and keep the rest of the starter for your next batch.
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Ok, that's where I was kinda going with this. I only have 5 gallon fermenters, so making a 10 gallon batch adds a little excitement for consistency. I use 3 buckets for blending/aerating when I do 10 gallons. I put 6 gallons in 1 bucket, 2 gallons each in the others. I hold the fullest bucket up high and pour into the next, rotating it until I get so much froth the buckets have to sit for a few minutes to be able to combine into two bucket for the ferment. This technique worked VERY well for me.

So my general idea of making a larger slurry for a starter will work. The 'beer' from it will probably not be very good, but I'm thinking it'll be great for stirring up the slurry without a lot of additional water for makeup (killing the OG, obviously) The waste will be exactly the same stuff as the waste from the wort, just no flavorings, and I have to add to the wort for makeup anyway, may as well be a weak beer slurry with lots of yeast in it. I like this idea rather than just dumping raw water into a mix. I like for things I'm putting in to actually be contributing instead of just being a filler upper.

I may actually want the overpitch one time, just to see what the effects are. Pretty sure I'm already familiar with under pitching after trying some liquid yeasts. There's a definite flavor difference from the dry pitch stuff, but I'm not sure it's a better flavor, or worse. Just different. Hard to describe what my taste buds are telling me.

Sorry if I come across as stressing out. Not really stressed. It's more about haveing a discussion and learning from people that know a lot more than I do. I want to understand all the parts of what I'm trying to do, and what to expect of the effects on the end product. Books don't have it all, but they certainly have some good tools to learn the trade. There's no substitute for experience, lots of it, and many different kinds. I'm past the basic mechanics of the process now, and want to learn more of the advanced processes and the effects of that on the Beer 101 recipes. Same reason I join ANY forum or user's group. To LEARN. If I can't understand something completely and want to do it, I'll bug the crap outta folks until I do understand it better. I've always had a hunger for knowledge. I'm not a "know-it-all", I just like to understand what I'm doing and why some things MUST be done in a certain order or by a certain method. I'm a very basic brewer at the moment, but would eventually like to come up with something I can take to one of the local micro-breweries for taste tests. Can't sell it here without bonding, but can give it away, or brew it for someone that does have the bond. I find the beer crowd to be very laid back and relaxed (well, most of 'em). I don't mind sharing my own experience, albeit, most of you guys are all on the 21-speed articulated mountain bikes, and I'm still on my tricycle with training wheels trying to figure out which way to push the pedals. I've made enough now that commercial stuff I used to like tastes horrible to me, or has no taste at all. There isn't much difference in cost, but for the quality and flavor, I'll never go back (unless I get slack and don't keep my shelves stocked).
 
I guess my next question is what is the target most of you guys use, 1.0 for pros, or something less like us neophytes? Looking forward to the next batch of english ale that I do. Just gotta pick out a recipe and run with it.

I just checked on yesterday's harvesting efforts. I think I may have still got a little trub in this, but it's starting to stratify and clear up some. Looks more cloudy because of condensate on the jar (I'm in Alabama where a dry day is 80% humidity this time of year). Looking closely, I can see a white layer starting to form on top of the trub, though Nothing new or green swimming on top, no new creatures eating the food in my refrigerator. The missus shudders when I do science experiments. Says I remind her of Tim the Toolman. Well, he's got a good name anyway.

IMG_2657[1].JPG

I just looked closely at this photo, and it looks like the mouth of the jar is filthy. It is not, I assure you. Must be some kind of strange optical illusion from condensate. I boiled that jar and the lid, then sprayed it with Star-San while it was still warm, and let it dry. It is probably the most sanitary vessel in this house at the moment. I guess I'll know when I pull the lid and take a sniff (which I will certainly do before I pitch it). I think I'll get a dry pitch pack with the next recipe just for backup in case this is actually turning into some sort of extraterrestrial life form. Maybe do that, and get enough DME to make a starter for the other batches too. I've got an empty fermenter, and empty bottles, so need to get brewin again.
 
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Trialben said:
you can pitch some of that slurry saved in the mason jar no starter needed unless it's a month or two old.
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Something I think I heard in the same podcast was "a vitality starter". I meant to look that up but what the hay.....I'll ask that here...is that some sort of feeding process for slurry that may be nominal or getting a little old??
 
No problem. I honestly usually just make a 1-2L starter for a 5 gallon batch and save a bit then toss whatever else is in the flask in the wort. The others on here have more mathematical ways of doing it that are probably more reliable, but don't stress yourself out to hard on it. Yet. You have lots of time to stress out about minutia later. ;)
 
Hawkbox said:
No problem. I honestly usually just make a 1-2L starter for a 5 gallon batch and save a bit then toss whatever else is in the flask in the wort. The others on here have more mathematical ways of doing it that are probably more reliable, but don't stress yourself out to hard on it. Yet. You have lots of time to stress out about minutia later. ;)
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Not stressing, per se, just trying to understand. Sometimes an opinion from a purist can lead a noob down a very dark path. I try to NEVER be the expert with an only way, but always try to offer a suggestion. My sig on a more permanent site I use (for tractors) says pretty much exactly that. "Advice is usuallyfree, and worth EXACTLY what you pay for it" I'm an aging engineer, and have always tended to overanalyze most things I try to do. While it may slow me down at times, I usually make far fewer mistakes when I take my time and listen to experience. Not making mistakes is a lot faster than fixing them.
 
I've been an IT Sysadmin my entire adult life so I understand both the attitude and the potential ego of "experts". I was incredibly intimidated when I started brewing because of the purist approach on a lot of forums. There is a place for it, but I spent a lot of time thinking if I made even a small error I had to just toss everything and start over.

It's surprisingly hard to mess up beer as long as you're clean, and I try to keep that in mind when people are looking for advice when starting out.

What kind of tractor you rolling? I don't farm but my mom still lives on the farm up north.
 
Hawkbox said:
No problem. I honestly usually just make a 1-2L starter for a 5 gallon batch and save a bit then toss whatever else is in the flask in the wort. The others on here have more mathematical ways of doing it that are probably more reliable, but don't stress yourself out to hard on it. Yet. You have lots of time to stress out about minutia later. ;)
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Completely forgot to ask my question. Do you pour off the 'beer' from your starter and rinse (much like doing a slurry rinse), or just shake 'n bake? You also said you save 'a bit'. Do you do this by mixing/agitating first and saving a small portion of the starter (to make another starter), and the same question regarding the rinse to remove some of the waste material?

How much does the waste in the culture harm flavor? Or for that matter, I'm guessing some of it can actually enhance the flavors too, depending on your palate.

Just for some numbers involvement so I can understand your process better:

Let's say you made a 2000 mL starter from a fresh smack-pack. Brew day comes. Take your starter outta the fridge to warm up and wake up the little beasties while you're making your brew. Wort's ready, time to pitch. Do you agitate the starter as is with the beer waste in it, or pour off the beer and top up with clean water to mitigate the off taste of non-hopped beer? Do you top back up to 2000 mL? Would you agitate your flask, pour (a magic number) 500 mL into another flask, then the other 1500 mL into the new wort? Do you make up a new 'wort' for the new starter (500mL portion) you just saved? I'm guessing this would be a good way to keep a clean strain of a favorite yeast around for a while, and always 'raised' on fresh starter wort. To me, this sounds like a need for rinsing each new starter portion, but maybe I'm not following the whole starter growing process. How many brews do you typically get from one smack pack?

Heck, I'm still learning the lingo and alternate terms and collecting references for substitutes. The learning curve is still straight up, just like I like it.
 
Ok so for first paragraph, I sometimes chill and pour off the beer but often I don't bother. Depends on how big the starter is and if I have a lot of head space or not really. This is a good read you might like https://brulosophy.com/2016/10/10/decanted-vs-full-yeast-starter-exbeeriment-results/

By saving a bit I swirl the flask up and then fill a 500ml mason jar with it and put a piece of tape with the type and date on it. Then the rest goes into the fermenter.

I can't say the waste affects flavour at all personally but someone smarter than me might know more.

For your scenario I'm going to bullet point it to make it easier to read.
1- Buy smack pack or dry yeast
2- Make your starter (I generally harvest right off the batch I'm making but you can also just mix water and DME)
3- Put pack in starter, let it go for around 36 hours if possible
4- Pour 500ml off into a mason jar and let it settle in the fridge
5- Pour the rest in the brew (or chill it and pour off the beer then swirl and dump.) Either option works fine
6- Repeat step 2 for the next batch of beer but use the 500ml from the last starter as Step 1 this time.

I've used the same yeast for well over a year doing starters and saving some for next time. The only reason to stop and get a new one is if the existing one develops an off flavour or if you get bored of it and want to try something new. The longest one I kept track of was 12 "generations" or uses of the starter for a new batch.

Doing it this way keeps the yeast extremely clean as there is no hop or trub particulate in the yeast from the brew.
 
RoadRoach said:
learning from people that know a lot more than I do.
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Boy have WE got you fooled. Naah, we just made the mistake sooner than you.

Fwiw, I usually pitch the "0.5" level instead of 0.35, but as you wrote, TRY the overpitch to see what happens. You will not ruin your beer.

Oh, and I tend to pour off the 'beer' atop the yeast to minimize any flavor effects, but I'm not aggressive about it. Close enough is, surprisingly, close enough.
 
Ward Chillington said:
Something I think I heard in the same podcast was "a vitality starter". I meant to look that up but what the hay.....I'll ask that here...is that some sort of feeding process for slurry that may be nominal or getting a little old??
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There's some vitality starters that will run longer than the process I use, but if I've got some slurry that's been hanging around for 1-2 months I'll take 500 mL at the end of the mash and chill it down. Then I'll add my slurry to the half litre. That once the temperature has settled and the various thermometers are agreeing I'll add that to the fermenter. It's generally 2-4 hours later. I find it really cuts down the lag time.
 
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