Is it possible to put a yeast cake in a dehydrator and dehydrate it for storage?
Not if you want to be able to use it afterwards to make beer. You need strict temp and moisture control, not to mention sterile conditions.
It must be possible or you wouldn’t be able to buy it that way! 
That said, I’m sure it’s a bit more complicatied that chucking some slurry into a dehydrator. I’ve never heard of anyone trying to do that at home. Are you trying to save money or just get into culturing your own yeast? There’s some good books out there on the matter, and none I’ve read have adressed dehydrating…
I’d guess they must have some special system for keeping the yeast cool while it’s being dried. With how yeast doesn’t really like heat very much, it seems like a regular food dehydrator would be too hard on it.
[quote=“Demus”]It must be possible or you wouldn’t be able to buy it that way!
That said, I’m sure it’s a bit more complicatied that chucking some slurry into a dehydrator. I’ve never heard of anyone trying to do that at home. Are you trying to save money or just get into culturing your own yeast? There’s some good books out there on the matter, and none I’ve read have adressed dehydrating…[/quote]
Not thinking of saving money, just expanding my beer brewing envelope. My Harvest Maid dehydrator goes down to 85 degrees. I would have no idea how to keep it sterile-ish, unless I put it in the beer fridge to keep outside nasties to a minimum.
I did some searching on this site, Google and others and really came up with nothing.
I am going to be transferring a California Common from the secondary to a keg tomorrow. Maybe I will take the small cake, dehydrate it, rehydrate it and make a 1 gal batch and see what happens.
Sounds like a cool experiment; post the results!
Obviously it’s possible under lab conditions. I don’t think a home dehydrator is quite the same…
