I’m brewing an Irish Red extract kit in the next week or so. The OG is 1.066. I’ve never done a starter before. The recommended yeast is Wyeast 1450 Denny’s Fav 50. I just brewed an ale yesterday with that yeast.
I would like to harvest that yeast to reuse. I’ve watched alot of youtube videos and read up on that aspect of it, and I’m comfortable with it.
These are my questions:
Should I use one smack pack of the Wyeast plus the starter? Or can I just use 100% of the harvested yeast?
If I use just the harvested yeast, how do I know how much to pitch? I’m a little confused as to figuring out how many viable cells,etc are in the starter.
Is it possible to pitch too much yeast? I know under pitching can cause off flavors.
Is a stirrer necessary? Can I just shake or swirl the container a couple of times a day?
This might be just the start of my questions, thanks much, love this forum.
use mrmalty.com
as a rule of thumb though, you generally want your yeast cells to double in the new beer so if your first beer was say 1.033 (and the same volume) you might try pitching the whole yeast cake.
You don’t want to use the entire cake from a brew. That would be an over pitch.
This may help. I strain the hop debris when pouring into the fermentor. My harvested yeast is clean. I harvest 400 milliliters of yeast and estimate 2 billion cells per milliliter. The estimate may be very conservative. This volume is after a week, to compact, in the jar. My jar would contain 800 billion cells.
Adjust the defaults in Mrmalty to reflect the amount of non-yeast material in your harvested yeast.
I agree with using the yeast cake from your prior brew. After racking the first beer off the yeast cake I’d probably pour out 1/2-2/3 of the yeast cake to save then pour the new red ale right in on the yeast. I do it all the time. You can use mrmalty or brewersfriend to estimate how much yeast you have from that first ale and how much you need for the red ale or just do the above. I doubt you’ll need anywhere near the whole cake for a 1.066 beer. If it were 1.080 or higher I might use the whole cake. Even if you did you’d just get a bit of blow off and probably no other noticeable issues.
OK, starting to understand a bit more. Trying to understand when you say no need to “wash” the yeast. I assume you still want to let it settle in a jar and pour it off the trub? I probably won’t brew my next batch for a week or two after I harvest the yeast from my current batch. Saying that, I assume I can just store the jars of yeast in the refrigerator until that time. At that time what’s the best way to wake the yeast up? Just warm it to room temp, or make a starter at that time?
I do have a stir plate I found laying around at work for a past project that they have no need for, love free stuff like that!
[quote=“macminn18”]OK, starting to understand a bit more. Trying to understand when you say no need to “wash” the yeast. I assume you still want to let it settle in a jar and pour it off the trub? I probably won’t brew my next batch for a week or two after I harvest the yeast from my current batch. Saying that, I assume I can just store the jars of yeast in the refrigerator until that time. At that time what’s the best way to wake the yeast up? Just warm it to room temp, or make a starter at that time?
I do have a stir plate I found laying around at work for a past project that they have no need for, love free stuff like that![/quote]
when you rack the beer, leave a bit behind in the fermenter. Use it to swirl the leftover yeast and trub into suspension. Pour all of that into 2-3 sanitized containers. Store them in the fridge. If you’re brewing in the next couple weeks, you can just take a container out of the fridge and pitch it in the new wort. Much older than that, use some of the slaved slurry to make a new starter. No need to warm up the slurry (or ANY yeast) before pitching it.
