So I will be kegging a 1.060 IPA tonight and brewing a 1.075 DIPA in a couple of days. I was thinking of re using the yeast cake and looking for some advice. The IPA was in a glass carboy but I would like to put the DIPA in a bucket. My plan is keg IPA, leaving maybe half inch of beer, place sanitized foil over carboy opening. On brewday rouse yeast cake by swirling carboy, then pour everything into sanitized fermenter bucket. Then dump wort on top of that, aerate, and place bucket in fermenter room. Will this work OK? Will there be plenty of yeast for the higher gravity wort? Any other thoughts or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
I'd just sanitize the bung and airlock, and close it that way... although foil would work. beyond that... use a blow-off for the DIPA. Yeast cakes are over-pitching, and it can be explosive.
This will work. You won't necessarily need the whole cake for 1.075OG beer however...a quart or two of sludge will do the job.
Would there be any negative to just using the whole Cake? I want to be sure I have enough yeasties. I guess the bung and airlock would work fine and be just as easy, I think I will do that.
There will be PLENTY of yeast to ferment your dipa. Ive only reused yeast once but the fermentation took off. After two hours the airlock was bouncing around like kids in a schoolbus
There are risks involved with overpitching...a quick search will provide enough information to make your head spin. According to Mr. Malty, even a cup of slurry will do the trick on your DIPA (1.075 is not all that big of a beer)...
Temp control and blowoff is probably your biggest worry since that thing will take off fast and furious. I used to reuse yeast like that and didn't see much issue with the yeast profile since I wasn't looking for estery beer. But in recent years have been doing 10 gal. barleywine batches fermented in two vessels - one would be with fresh yeast, the other on a yeast cake from previous batch. I have found the fresh yeast batch to have cleaner malt and hop flavor, while the yeast cake batch seemed a bit more muddled in flavor (same yeast profile though and same attenuation rates) - have stopped the yeast cake practice and only pitch fresh/clean yeast now. YYMV, so try it for yourself.
You might want to think about rinsing the yeast. It will ensure that you are only pitching the more viable cells, not dead cells or trub/hop particles from the previous batch. Here is an article: http://byo.com/stories/techniques/article/indices/19-brewing-tips/743-harvesting-yeast-techniques also a simple google search of yeast rinsing will yield a plethora of resources.
The rinsing technique is a big ol' waste of time for op. He's going from an IPA to a DIPA and will only be on his second pitch. That trub isn't going to hurt anything.
After a little more research I think I will pour about 2 cups of the slurry into a sanitized glass jar then pitch that into my DIPA. Thanks all for your input.
You probably wouldn't even need to aerate the wort you are pouring on the yeast cake. The aeration helps the yeast cells to divide/multiply and you don't need that to happen because the well developed yeast cake already has plenty of yeast cells. Actually the aeration of the wort could even cause a slight lag time in fermentation if anything.
