Harvesting yeast for next brew...

Ingredients
1

I’ve never done this before so looking for some advice.

I’m looking to harvest some yeast from my Pliny the Elder clone brew. I used a WLP001 yeast to ferment and it’s been sitting on it for around 10 days. This weekend I’m looking to make a coffee oatmeal stout and was hoping to reuse the yeast. I know how to do this in principle (but any hints and tips great fully received!)

My questions are

  1. The Pliny clone is obviously heavily hopped, the stout isn’t. Will I get a residual taint of hops in the stout?
  2. If so is there a way to minimise this?
  3. is this just a bad idea?!

Thanks for the help.

D

2

Cropping from a bitter batch will not make your next batch bitter.    However, cropping from an above 6.0% ABV beer is not the best practice.

3

OK thanks! The OG of this beer is 1.072. I guess I should just dump it then…[emoji20]

4

Being a yeast abuser, I often harvest and reuse the yeast from a 1.072 OG beer.  I’ve never seen a problem.  I don’t harvest from anything much above that, though.

5

That’s pushing it.  Some strains can handle the abuse while others cannot.  I repitched yeast cropped from a 7.3% ABV Rye IPA a couple of months back.  I pitched this batch with yeast taken from a 5% ABV batch.  The 5% and 7.3 ABV batches fully attenuated with no odd flavors. The fermentation that immediately followed the 7.3% beer failed to fully attenuate.  I have since repitched the culture with full attenuation, but I had to double-drop the culture twice.  I am still not happy with its performance.  I have serially repitched cultures in the past that were taken from sub-6.0 ABV beers for up to 12 batches with no major degradation in performance.  Six percent ABV appears to be a generally agreed upon alcohol level when taking crops.  It’s part of the reason why British brewers can repitch forever.

6

Chico is pretty robust and I doubt you’ll have an issue, but I personally would pull 20 mL or so of slurry and use that to propagate a new starter.

7

Thanks for the advice everyone! Very useful!

Cheers!

8

I’m with Sean, I’d pull 20-40 mL then throw it in 500 mL wort 4-6 hours pre-pitch to ensure 100% vitality. Water down some of your real wort to ~1.040 SG, boil for 5 min, chill, add yeast, put on stir plate or shake intermittently.