Diamond Lager Yeast

Ingredients
21

Caution, Captain Obvious here.

Like most on this forum, I’ve tried pitching hydrated dry yeast and direct pitching dry yeast, and have a personal preference, but if an inexperienced brewer is reading this, you might be well-served to try both methods and decide for yourself if the time spent to rehydrate the yeast is worth it to you.

FWIW, regarding dry yeast suppliers official position on direct pitching, I found this just now on Lallemand’s website:

Upon rehydration, dry cell membranes undergo a transition from gel to liquid crystal phase. Rehydration in sterile water is recommended prior to pitching into wort in order to reduce stress on the cell as it transitions from dry
to liquid form. Proper rehydration of dry yeast will produce a highly viable and vital liquid slurry.

However, digging a little deeper into their technical data sheet for Diamond Lager this is found:

DIRECT PITCH “no rehydration” Sprinkle  the  yeast  evenly  on  the  surface  of  the  wort  in  the  fermenter as it is being filled. The motion of the wort filling the fermenter will aid in mixing the yeast into the wort.

So their recommendation remains to rehydrate before pitching, but then they explain the process of direct pitching, although buried a bit in the data sheets. From memory, Fermentis has similar verbiage, or at least meaning, on their website. IMHO, they might have a clearer statement on why they recommend rehydration.

22

To the best of my knowledge, after speaking with microbiologists at both companies, I agree.

23

Ha! Just messing around. I’ll stop. Just seems a little redundant lately.

24

Regarding the use by dates on dry yeast, I wouldn’t sweat it overmuch. A couple months ago I direct pitched a sachet of S-23 with a use be date of 10/20 and it was fine. A few months prior I remember using a package of something that was more than 2 years past the use by date with no problems. Sorry but I don’t want to invest the time digging through my records to get the specifics of which yeast it was, I pretty sure it was Fermentis. Liquid yeast though of course is an entirely different ball of wax.

25

I wonder if yeast in general has the same characteristics? Bread yeast is not much good past expiration. Sure, you can bake bread with it, but the performance drops off by a wide margin. My motto is…“When in doubt, throw it out.”

We just dumped 2 quarts of Czech yeast slurry. It looked very good, had a great aroma, but was so slow to get going. Even after making a good starter for it.

26

How in the world are you collecting two quarts of thick slurry from 10-gallons of beer? That is way past maximum cell density for 10 gallons, especially with lager yeast cultures which tend to have smaller yeast cells than ale cultures. I would be hard-pressed to collect 500ml of thick, relatively clean slurry from a 5.25-gallon batch. How trub-free is your wort going into the fermentation vessel?

27

My wort has nearly zero trub. Zero. And I commonly harvest between 1 and 2 quarts of slurry from a brew.
Maybe I’m doing this all wrong…I really don’t know.

Here is what my yeast harvest looks like. This taken from 7 gallons, 2 full quarts, a couple days ago, S-04. The small spots you see are actually air pockets. This yeast is like peanut butter.

28

FWIW, when I harvest from a 6 gal. batch I end up with maybe 1-2 inches of slurry in a qt. jar.  So it kinda makes me wonder what you’ve got there.

29

Now I’m confused. When I harvest slurry from 5 gallon batches, I collect a full quart with a lot left in the fermenter. When the yeast settles out the quart jar is about 3/4 full.

30

I am willing to bet that most of your crop is break material.  Next time, try swirling your solids back up into suspension, waiting a couple of minutes for the break and dead cells to settle out before decanting only the topmost liquid fraction.  I guarantee that your crop will be smaller and much cleaner, but it will have a higher per ml viable cell count because viable cells remain in suspension for a more than a couple of minutes whereas break and dead cells do not.

31

If one’s crop does not look like this one after things settle out, one is cropping break, dead cells, and hop particulate matter.

eNKQpg4.jpg
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32

So what about TX who gets zero trub? Zero

33

That is not a zero trub, low dead cell crop, not even close.

34

This is 5th gen S-04, pulled off the Barley Wine I just kegged. It is super clean, and so thick we had to scrape it out of the fermenter with spoons and spatulas.

It would not drain out of the ports. In fact, the beer had to be siphoned out as the yeast had buried the drain ports.

Makes me wonder why I’m the only one who has such good luck with yeast harvesting, and getting such a nice volume (1 or 2 qts) of clean slurry? Go back and look at the photos. Clean. If there is trub, it is so little in volume that it’s not noticeable.

I always swirl and decant prior to feeding, and then pitching harvested yeast.

Again, I must be doing something wrong.

I’m just a rookie here, as you all know!

35

You are not lucky.  You overpitch, which results in the carryover of a lot of dead cells.  A  properly pitched culture will not produce that much yeast.  That is way beyond maximum cell density, even accounting for replacement cell reproduction during the stationary phase.  The way to prove this phenomenon is to ferment in a clear fermenter.  If you have anything in the bottom of the fermenter after active fermentation has started, it is either break or dead yeast cells.  There is zero probability that seven gallons of wort will hold 1/2 gallon of yeast in suspension.

How do you chill?  Do you use an immersion chiller or do you pump through a plate/counterflow chiller?

36

When you think you’re the only one who’s right and everyone else is wrong it might be time to re examine things.

37

ok, i see what youre talking about i think. and i’m interested.

can you explain this again though? so, after siphoning off the beer i want bottled/etc, the remaining beer and yeast slurry-cake at the bottom, i should give it a light swirling and use the liquid on top and leave the denser slurry?

then build a starter from there?

38

There may be some dead cells, a possibility. But there is little if any trub, and no break material.

My brewing technique employs only whole leaf hops. We have a triple filter system in the boil kettle, and it catches 99.9% of all the gunk that I do not want in my wort. This includes hot-break, and cold-break. And, the trub remains behind in the BK.

Only clean, crystal clear wort goes into the fermenter. I am anal about this, to the point of being a freak.

In this example, the wort was 1.087 OG. The yeast loved it! And reproduced at a healthy rate. This ale yeast strain is unique to me, in that it is soooo thick in viscosity. Thicker than peanut butter. It was a challenge to get it out of the SS Conical, and into my storage jar.

During the harvest process, the S-04 was hyper clean, no crud or debris that was visible to our eyes.

My procedure and technique has been born out in beer competitions. What I post here is proprietary to our brewing, so it is absolutely correct for our situation.

The rest of those on this forum obviously have other procedures and techniques that work for them. That is fine.

But going forward, we will stick with the brewing procedure that produced the beers the BJCP folks liked, and that won multiple awards for us. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

You are correct, I am not lucky. The quality beer we make comes from dedicated hard work, long hours in the brew day, and skill developed over 3 decades.

Immersion chiller, copper. The chill process takes us about an hour, maybe longer. There is logic to this long chill time.

As always, thanks for your input.

39

What’s the reasoning behind an hour long chill time? I appreciate that you have decades of experience and award winning beers. Sounds like you should be dishing out the advice instead of asking for it.

40

yup - “new to homebrewing” and also “3 decades of experience”

lol