Yeast Harvesting - First Try - WLP001

In an attempt to start saving as much money as I can with this great hobby, I've decided to take a try at harvesting some yeast. This past weekend I rinsed the WLP001 that I used to ferment the Amber Ale I recently brewed. My hope is that I can use this rinsed yeast for the first time in a few weeks.

I pretty much followed BillyBrew's video. I found his tutorial to be super easy to understand.

SANITATION IS KEY THROUGHOUT THIS ENTIRE PROCESS!!!

To sum up the process, here is what I did. Earlier in the day before I racked my Amber Ale to the keg, I boiled 1 gal of water to santize it. I let it cool and even put it in the frig for a while. I had my bucket fermentor in the frig so I wanted to have the sanitized water and beer close to the same temperature not to shock the yeast. I cold crash all of my beers because I find that I get a nice clean, yeast free product into the kegs. I also wanted to settle out as much yeast as possible.

I racked my beer to the kegs as normal. After I had it kegged up, I poured the gallon of sanitzed water into the bucket and stirred it up with a sanitzed spoon to get it well mixed up. The reason for this is you want to get the various parts of the yeast cake to settle into layers. I gave it around 20 minutes to settle so I took that time to start cleaning equipment. The heaviest later will settle at the bottom and will have hop particles, dead yeast, proteins, break, etc and you'd like to do your best to separate that out from your harvested yeast. There is a middle layer that settles that is the healthiest yeast and then a light layer at the top of just left over beer and other light matter.

After 20 minutes I slowly poured the connects of the fermentor into a 1.5 gal pitcher leaving the darkest and heaviest matter behind. It was very easy to see what I didn't want to tranfer into the pitcher. It was very dark vs. the rest of the fluid.

Now that I had the yeast cake out of the fermentor and in the pitcher, I waited another 20 minutes for that to settle as I clean up other equipment. This time, there was little to no dark matter at the bottom, a nice creamy white layer of yeast in the middle and the light layer of beer at the top. Sorry, no picture of this step, as I forgot to take one. Maybe I'll put one up after I do this process again.

I then poured around half of the contents of the pitcher into 4 mason jars leaving any darker stuff at the bottom. I did end up pitching the rest this time.

This is what a mason jar looked like right after the pour. Very cloudy.

After filling the 4 mason jars. I put them in the frig. This is what they looked like after 12 hours...

You can notice the yeast starting to settle at the bottom but still a very cloudy mixture.

I labeled each jar with some tape on the lid to remind me when I harvest it (so you can estimate viability), the type of each and the generation. You can use yeast for several generation but I'm not going to get into that in this post and I'd like plan to use them no more than 4-5 times. You can find info about this on the web.

This was what it looked like after 2 days......

A pretty clean jar now with most of the yeast at the bottom.

These jars will sit in there until I'm ready to use them, which should be in a few week. One item I do need to finalize is to get an estimate of how many yeast cells I have. I read on one of the message boards that there are 30 million yeast cells per 1 oz of yeast. I've seen some conflicting stories. But this is my next task to learn how much of this yeast I need to pitch so I don't under or overpitch and if I need to make a starter or not. More to come on this as I learn more.