I tried my fourth or fifth go at rinsing yeast a few weeks ago. On Tuesday, decanted off the remaining liquid on top, and dumped about just shy of 400mL of slurry into some wort to wake up the yeast for saturday’s brew. Sat on a stir plate for 36 hrs, then into the fridge to crash cool.
Here’s what it looks like this morning (sorry for the crappy phone pic):
As I understand it, the white ribbon is the yeast - could it be that this is ALL the yeast I actually have in there? However, the solids are well above 600mL now, so I’d think there was some growth. I’m concerned now that I don’t have enough yeast from the looks of things.
I think I’m done with yeast rinsing - I’m obviously not very good at it, and I have never had a problem with pitching slurry and doing a dump at high krausen to take away the dead matter.
What type of yeast is this? I’m asking b/c I never had good results separating yeast and trub when washing lager yeasts. I think the matter up to 600 ml is a mix of yeast and trub. It’s difficult to say how much yeast. My experiences with weighing yeast sediment and counting the yeast ate limited to cultures with almost no trub.
What do you need the yeast for and how much wort are you pitching?
Even being conservative and saying that’s 50% trub, and the yeast are 75% viable, you’d have 1.5 billion/mL, right around a trillion total. You only need to pitch ~450 billion. So I’d pitch half of the slurry and if anything, you’ll be overpitching.
Hard to tell for sure from the photo, but it looks to me like quite a bit of yeast still in suspension above the trub/yeast layer at the bottom of the flask.
yeah - it was still crashing at the time I took the pic.
however, I had NO problems with the pitch - I pitched a sloppy 2/3rds of it - activity in 4-5 hours and it appeared to finish in about a week, though I haven’t taken a reading to be sure - not really worried - it ain’t getting kegged for a couple more weeks anyhow.
