Harvesting and saving yeast

Well, cream ale yeast didn’t survive… I didnt have enough of a beer cap to protect it…:confounded: Sneezles61

I just started harvesting last fall and just used a Safale 05 that I harvested in December. Used a starter and it worked awesome in a double IPA that’s in its second week now. Don’t think I will harvest from this batch though as there is a butt load of hops sludge in the bottom of the fermenter. We’ll see what it looks like when I transfer to secondary.

1 Like

Its hard to separate out the hops trub from the yeast cake, and even if you did and didnt want to brew a hoppy brew, you’d have some flavors left, mingling in with the yeast. Sneezles61

When you pitch a saved yeast do you;
Make a starter for it 24-48 hours in advance?
Pitch straight from the fridge the entire mason jar?
Do you notice a difference if you poor off the remaining beer in the mason jar and do your best to pitch only the upper fine yeast layer?

Thanks

You have to a least warm it up. What I do is take it out and look at it if the beer cap is clean and it smells nice I’ll use it. I pour off most of the cap give it a few swirls and dump it in. I leave the really solid stuff behind. Not gonna hurt to dump in the beer cap but won’t help anything either

Oh I don’t generally make a starter but I have didn’t notice anything different really. If it’s older you might want to start it up and pitch at high krausen. Don’t have to make a real “starter” which is a technique used to build up your yeast count since your using slurry that’s not an issue

Lately I try to pitch my starters at high krauesen. If I cold crash a starter then I pour off the beer.