Skill # 1 million: Yeast washing.

The Rye IPA is essentially gone.  It was a great beer out of the pig...really couldn't believe how well it turned out.  The bottles were a little hit or miss.  The Redwine infection which I seem to always have really took a hit out of the hop profile.  Considering the fact that the witch was only in the bottles I'm thinking that the problem was with the yeast, cleaning or sanitizing. 

I brewed an Irish dry stout a couple weeks back. Missed again on my gravity which is really starting to piss me off.  I'm going to take next month to upgrade my system and try a simple American Pale. 

The low gravity gave me an opportunity to learn a skill I've been wanting to try....washing the yeast.  This is a procedure where you harvest the yeast slurry from a batch of beer, wash out the used hops/residual grains (known as 'trub') and propagate the yeast to use in a future batch.  Since the stout used only 1 oz of hops, and was low gravity, it was a perfect beer to harvest from.  One rule of reusing yeast is to always pitch "up."  This means, always pitch the yeast into a beer with a higher gravity than the beer they were harvested from.  General rule of thumb is to only use around 3 generations of yeast, else you run the risk of rampant mutations and weird flavors.

I racked the stout into secondary, which left behind a beautiful slurry of Wyeast Irish Dry Ale yeast.  I put in a little water, shook it up and poured into a sanitized, clear growler.  I let it settle overnight and poured off the supernatent (liquid on top).  Put in a little water and shook it real good again and let it settle.  This time the supernatent was pretty light in color, so I went ahead and put in ~1/8 cup of sanitized water, shook it up and poured this into an erlenmeyer with ~1/4 cup of sugar/water/yeast nutrient.  That was this morning.  At this moment the erlenmeyer is fizzing along really well, with 1 bubble per 5 sec out of the airlock.  Once growth levels off I'll freeze the slurry, wait a few days and see if the frozen yeast can be reincarnated.  The only down side is that this means my next beer will have to be a british/irish style to fit the yeast profile.

-James