Early last year, I started reading about sterile water suspension and started putting up some small samples in these little vials:
All of the instructions say that room temp storage is acceptable, but I kept mine in the little, otherwise useless, tray on the door of my little fridge anyways.
On 4/18/10, I put away some WLP028.
On 9/27/11, I streaked a plate.
On 9/29/11, my plate looked like this:
You can see that I really didn’t streak the whole plate very well. I really didn’t think it would take off after 17 months, so I just streaked one sloppy line, burned the loop once, then streaked across it once. I just wanted to confirm that the samples weren’t viable before tossing them. I glad to be wrong!
I didn’t get a picture of it today, but there were some more outlying isolated colonies to choose from, so I used a few of those to start a couple cc’s of sterile wort.
I’m surprised this method gets as little chatter as it does!
