Repitching yeast

[BigBadBrad]

So are most of you guys pitching right on to your primary cake and not your secondary cake? Two of the reasons I have heard to do this is, your not getting all that trub, and that the yeast that make it to secondary are more viable yeast, they hung in there longer. A lot of the yeast in the primary is yeast that fell out early becasue they weren't as viable as the ones who make into the secondary to fall out.
I plan on repitching next week from secondary. Anyone think of a reason why I should restrain my repitches to the primary. I am just using US-56, cheap enough but I want to get warmed up for the pac-man in the fridge and get it ready for a barley wine. I'm thinking pitching the 3rd generation pac-man to a barley wine. Good idea???

The main problem with repitching the yeast from the secondary, especially after two or three generations, is that you are repitching the least flocculant cells. This will tend to give you a more cloudy beer after several generations and you may end up with under attenuated beer since these are the slowest workers.

Brad

[kace069]

Well at what point do you stop pitching on that primary full of trub? After the second pitch wouldn't you have like 4 or 5 inches of trub? I can see that there are better reasons to pitch on the primary but doesn't the collected trub scare you a little?

[BigBadBrad]

Well at what point do you stop pitching on that primary full of trub? After the second pitch wouldn't you have like 4 or 5 inches of trub? I can see that there are better reasons to pitch on the primary but doesn't the collected trub scare you a little?

I don't pitch on top of the yeast cake. I pour the yeast cake into a sanitized jar and let everything settle down to the bottom as it chills in the fridge. After it settles, I pour off the beer on top then add sterilized and cooled water. Shake it up and let it sit for 10 minutes or so. All the heavy trub settles to the bottom and the yeast stays in suspension. I then pour the yeast into another santized jar for storage or pitch directly into a new batch of wort. It may seem like a pain in the ass, but it really isn't. Plus, the yeast from one finished beer gives me enough yeast to pitch into two more batches. It's a real money saver.

I sterilize water in the pressure cooker using quart mason jars. I also make all-grain starter wort and can it. This makes brew days when I start with a new yeast strain very simple. The night before I brew, I put two quarts of my canned starter wort in a flask on the stirplate and add my vial of yeast. By the time I'm ready to pitch my yeast the next day I have increased my cell count about 4 fold.

Brad

[kace069]

Sounds like washing. I think I will give this a try.

[BigBadBrad]

Sounds like washing. I think I will give this a try.

It is washing. Just try to be as clean as possible.

Brad

[Tutor]

Just to keep this updated, I brewed my APA, on Christmas, and transfered the one I had in the primary bucket into a secondary carboy. The bucket had a nice sediment/yeast base and maybe 3 cups of beer that didn't get transfered when I racked.
Like a newbie I stood there debating if I should clean out the slurry then clean the bucket, pour in the wort areate then repitch the slurry or just pour my cooled wort on into the bucket without all the transfering and such. KISS won out and I used a starsan moistened paper towel to clean the small ring of crud from around the upper edge of the inside of the bucket, pitched my wort into the pail, and used my mixer to areate. Placed a lid on the pail with a 1 inch blowoff tube installed (I had made up just for this purpose last week) and put the other end in some left over starsan in a blowoff bucket.
I was getting bubbles through in 3 hours and within 8 hours I have a steady rummble running coming thru the tube, really making me see the light of repitching and/or using a starter.
Unfortunately I did not take a starting gravity prior to pitching, after pitching it was 10.64