Saving yeast

You might want to post this in the homebrewing forum.

Yes, you can reuse yeast. I do it often. Make sure you understand homebrewing well before attempting.

 

Well, this isn't Wine Advocate. But yeast is yeast is yeast.

So you have an awesome yeast? Really?
Re-using yeast is SOP for brewers. The easy thing to do is to leave it in the fermenter and leave some beer, er wine, on top. Don't expose it to atmosphere, keep the lid on with an airlock. Get some new wort, er wine, on to the yeast within 1 week. It will take off like a rocket.
You'll have awesome beer, ah... wine... in no time.

The much more complicated way is to harvest the yeast, wash it, store it in a suitable medium, maintain it, bring it back to pitching condition, propogate enough cells. And so on. $7 huh?

But if you are not sure how to manage yeast you are risking lost time and expense for the sake of $7. So half a day of brewing, um wine making that is... a week of fermenting, a month of carbonating or months of aging I guess ... well, wine months... $50 in ingredients.... for 7 measly bucks.

Cheers.

 

The way I prefer to harvest yeast is from my yeast starters. I just over-grow my starters by ~100B cells per yeastycalc and then before pitching into the beer, steal a yeast vial or two to place in the fridge until next time. I have been doing this for years now, so much easier than doing the whole "washing" procedure after a beer has completed fermentation and I rarely use the same yeast back-to-back so repitching on the yeast cake isn't always an option.

 

I would particularly be concerned about reusing wine yeast because of the high gravity of wine, cost of ingredients, and time until completion. You could have several batches of wine going with your reused yeast before you figure out that it was creating off flavors.

 

I have dozens of old White Labs vials that come in handy for this purpose. Pour part of a yeast cake into a sanitized vial and you're set. If you don't have any of these vials, small canning jars should work fine too.

 

No, you can't freeze it without adding glycerin and properly preparing it.

You can however, simply save the slurry at the bottom of your fermenter in a sanitized container with a loose fitting lid in your refrigerator.

 

I scoop out 2-4 medium sized canning jars (super sanitation here) of yeast when I keg the first generation beer and then I pitch wort back onto the yeast cake as well...this way I get up to 15 batches with regular Sacc (I usually reuse yeast for 3 generations and then pitch a new jar) and up to 50 or more batches with Brett and other bugs (reuse around 10 or so generations usually) out of 1 pack of yeast. So for me it's more of a savings of around $85 for clean yeast and over $200-$300 for Brett and bugs for reusing just 1 pack of yeast. If you stick to a strict sanitation regimen, you really have nothing to worry about by reusing yeast