Let Them Eat Cake

Yeast & Fermentation
1

I’m planning out 3 brews to start the new year. The plan is to use S-05 or Wyeast-1056 (which I believe are the same…pretty much) for my yeast and to go from batch to batch pitching on the yeast cake from the previous brew. I am fairly confident from batch #1 to batch #2 the cake will be fine but where I am not confident is what the size of the cake might be by the time I get to batch #3.

I will quickly lay out the brew schedules-
My fermentation temps will be running 62F-64F
All with the same base malt
#1 Blonde Ale OG 1.040
#2 American Pale Ale OG 1.053
#3 IPA (maybe IIPA) OG 1.072

I have washed and reused yeast with great results but I have yet to pitch onto a yeast cake directly. Basically I will be racking the beer off into secondary after 7 days of primary fermentation and pitching the new wort onto the yeast cake the same day. I do not want to over pitch the last batch so curious if you can tell by what I listed above if this might be a potential concern.

2

Try using some sort of yeast repitching calculator to be sure, but I would think that the yeast cake from the first beer would be large enough to ferment the other two batches. I would get three mason jars, the larger 1qrt size. After racking the Blonde to secondary, swirl the slurry up and pour equal amounts in the three jars. Pitch one jar into the Pale Ale and the other 2 jars into the IIPA.

I think using the entire yeast cake from either beer for the next is overkill and could lead to over pitching problems.