So I have had this idea for a while and I wanted to try it out.
So I am brewing a 2.5 gallon batch of a Amber Ale to see if this works. I took the o-ring off of a bottling bucket and put it the top of a mason jar. I am going to boil enough water to fill the mason jar up about half way. So in theory the yeast coming out of the blow-off tube will go into a clean sanitary environment. Thoughts, concerns or advice?
Well photo issues, but the tubing will go from the carboy to the mason jar and through the o ring. I plan on boiling the mason jar and then boiling the water. It should work. Hopefully the fermentation will be crazy enough to push yeast through the tubing. Maybe a little yeast nutrient will help. I am using US-05
The idea is similar to a pseudo Burton Union system. Google Homebrew Burton Union. I’ve wanted to make one for a while, but very low priority for me.
From what Mark has said, water might be a bad idea as the pH will not be low enough to prevent unwanted organisms.
Setting up a union-like recovery tank is not much more difficult, and one can do away with the water. The wort returns, but most of the yeast stays. Here’s an easy to build union-like recovery tank that someone on the net built:
PH levels make sense. Yeast is just so frickin expensive up here in Alaska. Just thinking of ways to save money. Is it possible to just make a starter 500ml bigger than needed and put that into a mason jar?
Done that many times. Just be certain your process is sanitary.
I have just harvested WY3787 through the blow off tube. Large pickle jar with some well water. Cold crashed the collection jar after I replaced the blow off tube with an air lock on the primary. Decanted and added 500ml of starter wort to have the yeast stored under beer. Have 250 ml of compacted yeast in a quart mason jar. I’ll also harvest from the primary in a few weeks.
May have been risky using well water in the collection jar, but never had an infection before, or maybe not yet, from not boiling well water for brewing.
Check out Tom Schmidlins article in Zymurgy Jan/Feb 2011
Excellent. I have all the Zymurgy publications, so I’ll take a look! Thanks buddy.[emoji6]
Have you considered cropping and repitching? It’s brain dead simple. There’s no need to rinse yeast with water.
This is what I do pretty much every batch. It’s the healthiest yeast in my brewing process and if spare yeast is going to end up in a mason jar anyway it might as well get there without going through the beer and all the other opportunities to pick up uninvited guests.
I see home brewers make this incorrect assumption all of the time. However, nothing could be further from the truth. Unless one is performing aseptic transfers into wort that was autoclaved in the vessel in which the yeast is propagated and stored, pitching a starter from a starter provides little to no advantage from a contamination point of view over serial repitching from normal gravity (sub-6% ABV) batches. Boiled starter wort is not sterile, and neither is a sanitized or boiled starter vessel.
Additionally, let’s compare the vitality of yeast cropped from a 1.050 batch of wort that was pitched with the cells from a 1L starter and yeast cropped from pitching a 1.5L starter with the yeast cropped from 500ml taken from a 1.5L starter. The maximum cell density (a.k.a. saturation point) for 1L of wort is approximately 200 billion cells (the value is approximate due to the varying size of yeast cells). If we crop 500ml from a 1.5L saturated starter, we are starting with roughly 100 billion yeast cells. When pitched into 1.5L of starter of wort, 100 billion cells has to double log(300 / 100) / log(2) = 1.6 times to reach saturation. Now, let’s compare and contrast that figure with pitching 200 billion cells into 5 gallons of wort. Five gallons of wort is 19L; hence, maximum cell density is 19 x 200 billion = 3.8 trillion cells. With a maximum cell density of 3.8 trilllion cells, 200 billion cells has to double log(3,800 / 200) / log(2) = 4.24 times. Guess what happens if we serially repitch a starter versus serially repitching yeast cropped from a normal gravity beer? If you guessed that the yeast culture loses vitality more rapidly, then you are correct.
Now, I know that some of you are saying to yourselves, “Mark must be delusional. We routinely ferment batches with 1L starters that were pitched with 100 billion cells from a White Labs vial, and the batch ferments well.” Well, the difference is that the 100 billion cells from the White Labs vial came from a yeast propagator that was inoculated with a small seed culture; hence, the cells in a White Labs vial are mostly young cells. Therein, lies the difference between cropped yeast of any kind of lab grown yeast.
Wow. That’s quite an explanation. I had to read it twice just to make sure I got it all. Isn’t it almost impossible to create a 100% sterile environment as a homebrewer? I clean and use Starsan like a lot of people on here do to create a sterile environment. If this isn’t the best of most effective way shed some light!!
No I haven’t ever tried that before. I ferment in glass as of right now. Just to clarify are you talking a out taking yeast off of the Krausen of a fermenting beer?
If you are serially repitching, do some of the cells from the original generation stick around for subsequent fermentations? At what point do the cells from the original generation die off to be replaced completely by newer cells?
You are not creating a sterile environment by sanitizing. You are creating a sanitary environment. Sanitary means that most of the vegetative cells have been killed. Boiling kills all vegetative cells, but it does not kill spores. Autoclaving (pressure cooking at 121C/250F under 15 pounds per square above normal atmospheric pressure) kills everything. White Labs does not boil their propagation media. They autoclave it. I autoclave my slants, plates, and first-level 40ml starters, and use aseptic transfer technique while working with this media to maintain a sterile environment.
By the way, Star San is a bactericide, not a full-spectrum microbiocide. Star San belongs to a class of sanitizing agents that are known as acid-anionic sanitizers. Acid-anionic sanitizers have limited ability to kill yeast and mold. I learned that lesson the hard way.
If the processes compared are:
Make a starter, unload the starter liquid with some of the yeast into a sanitized mason jar; or
Make a starter, unload the starter into a sanitized fermentor, use sanitized bottling equipment to remove the beer, then unload some of the trub into a sanitized mason jar;
Then I hardly see how the first is a less effective method of yeast recovery if only because less sanitized, but not sterilized, equipment is coming in contact with the beer.
I’ll agree with you that if the comparison is either of the above processes versus pitching new wort directly onto some or all of the trub from a prior batch then certainly that direct pitch is a superior process. However, when I brew I am almost never brewing another batch immediately after the next and often not brewing sequentially with the same yeast. So either way that yeast is going in a mason jar. I also have to store fermentors in an area where there is a lot of dust that finds its way to the exterior of the fermentors. These are screw top one gallon jugs for the most part. It’s difficult to get them effectively clean to pour out the yeast without picking up an infection. I’ve tried with a near 100% success rate of picking up a very aggressive infection. Going directly from starter to mason jar has solved that problem. That’s why I qualified my answer that this is the best option for my brewing process rather than insist it is best for all.
Yes, a percentage of old cells are cropped with the new cells. The larger the difference between the inoculation rate and maximum cell density, the higher the ratio of new to old cells. However, there is a tradeoff in that we want to ensure that the pitched culture is large enough to rapidly “own” the culture. The number one limiting factor in bottom-cropped yeast is contaminant load. There is an opportunity for whatever intruders have made their way into a culture to multiply each time it is cropped and repitched. That’s why proper handling of initial pitches is critical. For the most part, the cleaner the initial pitch, the longer a bottom-cropped culture can be repitched. Top-cropped cultures are an entirely different animal. They rely on the dynamic that wild yeast and bacteria generally do not crop to the top (i.e., if one captures a culture in the wild that top crops, one has more than likely captured a domesticated yeast strain), which why top-cropped yeast can be used almost indefinitely if handled correctly.
We have all been told to crop from the middle of the cone. The reason behind this recommendation is three-fold. The first reason is obvious in that the bottom of the cone contains most of the break. The second reason is also somewhat obvious in that we do not want to crop cells that exhibit early flocculation because that practice can result in a culture becoming progressively more flocculent. However, another reason for not cropping from the bottom of the cone is that it contains dead and older less viable cells that we do not want to pitch into our next batch.
A scar is left on the surface of the cell wall every time a yeast cell buds. As yeast cells take in nutrition and expel waste products through their cell walls, bud scars affect a yeast health.
Budding yeast and bud scars
Is there a better sanitizer than StarSan? I wonder how I’ve not had more infections with my plastic fermenters.
