Hi fellow brewers, I recently transferred my Flanders red to secondary and want to save the roeselare wyeast that I used. I just added a splash of water, sloshed it around and dumped it into a mason jar. I thought just adding a jar lid would be fine, I then threw it in the fridge is there a better way to do this? Thanks for and replies
Are you talking about harvesting yeast from a homebrew flanders red or storing dregs from a bottle? If the former, make sure your jar and lid were sanitized and you should be good. That's what I do.
AceMaster, I'm brand new to brewing so not sure how reliable this is but this seems like a good resource - http://billybrew.com/yeast-washing
This tutorial is solid . . . have used it many times with good results. However, IMO a better technique is to make a surplus of yeast before brew day. I'm always doing a yeast starter before every brew and it's no big deal to crank out an extra 50 - 100 billion of the little buggers. When complete, simply give your flask a hard shake and pour of the percentage of liquid that will give you this excess. This yeast has not been exposed to high alcohol and/or any off-flavors in the trub. I think this method is easier on the brewer and the yeast.
I'm brewing a Framboise lambic, and taking some of the dregs from Sour in the Rye from Bruery, I drank the bottle this saturday and recapped it. I'm going to directly pitch on top of the yeast I will already be adding. Does anyone know if this practice is ok.
Recapping a bottle with only the dregs is risky to say the least. You have removed the seal by uncapping and exposing the sediment to air without adding it to starter wort and removed the acidic, alcoholic beer that is also protecting it. Best practices would be to plan ahead and immediately pitch the dregs into a 0.25L 1.050 SG starter wort to give the dregs some food.
Can I pitch fresh dregs straight into the wort along with my lambic yeast blend without doing a starter?
Definitely. When many sour beer brewers re-use an oak barrel they do not grow a new sour culture from the finished beer, they just transfer beer into the barrel, relying on the culture that has become imbedded in the oak staves. Pitching the dregs is fine to replicate this step as long as you can be confident that the beer was not pasteurized, filtered, etc.
I asked Al buck via email about how to store his BugFarm for extended aging. His response: Always store living cells refrigerated Al Buck Eastcoastyeast.com
char yacobson (brettanomyces project, crooked stave) has stated many times that the rate of cell death sky-rockets in the fridge. he strongly recommends that all brett starter be stored at room temp. i just read somewhere recently that the same held true for bugs... need to find that reference. obviously, Al's opinion is a strong dissent.
