Has anyone tried straining wort directly onto the trub from a prior batch? (Same fermenter, which contains the yeast from a just-bottled batch.) I’m about to bottle a Saison and am very happy with how the yeast has performed, so I plan on using it again. I was wondering if I would be OK to pour a second Saison (slightly different recipe) directly into the fermenter of the previous one – no additional sanitation of the bucket, which would have been emptied for bottling just a few hours prior.
It’d make for a busy day, to be sure, but I thought that it might avoid risk of contamination if I cut back on the steps for saving the yeast.
Dumping onto a cake is seriously over pitching. It might not be so good for a saison. You may not get the yeast character you want. Scooping half of it out might work better. I generally just repitch 1/2 cup to one cup of slurry. It’s not hard to dump the cake into a jar, clean and sanitize the fermanter and pitch the correct amount of slurry.
I’d probably use 1/4 of the yeast cake if you’re brewing another batch of similar gravity. The only time I’ll use a whole cake is if I jump from a small beer (1.040-ish) to a big beer (1.100+).
If you do go ahead with your plan and put the fresh wort directly onto the yeast, be prepared for a very fast and raucous fermentation. If you don’t have much head space you may lose some beer.
Yes, I have done this lots of times, but the advice above about transferring into a sanitized jar, letting it settle and using a portion of the clean layer of yeast is a better idea.
I just did this with a Saison, It went very fast and intense…and got warm and I thought
I may have made a headache beer. It finished and was VERY cloudy. It will spend
considerable time in secondary before It even gets sampled…just FWIW…
I wish I would have washed some of the yeast from the cake now…in hindsight.