Test my harvested yeast?

Ingredients
1

Hey homebrewers,

So I recently harvested yeast from my recent white ipa. However, I sorta screwed up the process. Long story short, after cold crashing in a mason jar. I can’t tell if I just have a ton of yeast harvested or if its just all trub.
Before someone asks, where did I screw up? After dumping the distilled water into my fermentor, I shook/swirled it up like I’ve read and let it sit for 20 minutes. Just before transferring to the first set of mason jars, I shook it up again (MISTAKE)…  anyways, is there a way I can confirm that I have a ton of yeast, or just crappy trub? I plan on rebrewing the beer again soon, but don’t want to screw it up by pitching crap instead of yeast.

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I think the better way is skip the water. Swirl up your yeast cake with whatever beer remains after racking and pour that into the sanitized jar

3

Jim is correct.

But if you want to test it, make a starter.

4

There’s yeast there, and a lot. There’s also trub. There’s also dead yeast, and hop particles, and a bunch of other stuff. Make a starter on your next brew day, and as long as your yeast harvest is clean it’ll be okay.

In the future, I recommend starter harvesting for cleaner purer, healthier yeast…

5

This^^^^.  I quit rinsing yeast long ago becasue it was a PITA with no appreciable benefit

6

Can you post a picture?

7

I will add 2 pictures tonight. 1 will be from a previous yeast harvest that I know is successful. The other will be the questionable one.

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Drain off some of the liquid and add some wort. Put the lid back on and screw on the ring halfway so it can vent gas. If it ferments it’s good.

9

Definitely make sure it can vent gas! You don’t want your jar to explode.

10

I plan to start overbuilding starters and harvesting a clean culture from the starter. This calculator lets you overbuild your starters by a desired cell count.

11

So…
I was in the process of making a yeast starter today with previously harvested yeast that is totally unrelated to this original forum post. At the same time, I figured I would make a little more of starter wort to see if the belgian wit yeast would ferment (to confirm if I did have yeast or just a bunch of trubby crap). I took the harvested WLP400 yeast out of the fridge to let it warm up to room temp… long story short, as I walked back to the jar 10 or so minutes later, I noticed the huge 1 inch sediment shoot to the top of the jar. I slowly started to take the mason jar cover off… and wort/yeast went everywhere. Needless to say… it turns out that one inch layer at the bottom of the jar was all yeast.