Yeast Management?

Ingredients
1

I’ve been looking for a while and can’t get the answers I’m looking for.

I’m trying to figure out how to save and reuse yeast as needed.

We brew 20 gallon batches, conical fermentor

Using MrMalty with a 1.054 OG, stir plate we need 4.65 liters of starter. We’ll use 3 smack packs to create this and pitch.

After 7 days, trub was removed, fermentation is finished and yeast was removed. We had approximately 1 liter of material including some trub and a good amount of yeast with some liquid.

We repitched this into a second batch of the same beer.

1 - Can anyone tell me about how much actual yeast we had?

2 - If I wanted to save this yeast for a period of time, can I divide this into vials to create starters?

3 - How much yeast should be in a vial to create a starter? It doesn’t look like there is much yeast in a White Labs vial.

Please provide any relevant information.

thanks,

eric

2

MrMalty has a tab for repitching from yeast slurry which should help with number 1.

3

The easiest way to give a rough estimate of the number of yeast cells you had in your slurry is to do a sedimented cell volume:
http://www.wyeastlab.com/com-yeast-harvest.cfm
Of course it’s easier with a microscope and hemacytometer

I’d recommend looking into the Yeast book by Chris White and JZ for your other questions.