Culturing yeast from VERY OLD bottle conditioned beer?

[daveb]

Hi...i love the fact i have used many bottle conditioned beer yeast to ferment my own batch of beer, my last yeast was a Chimay blue and i still use the original culture from one bottle after 3 successive brews, washing and keeping some of the yeast each time for my next brew...


Now i was wondering what the odds are of successfully culturing some yeast from a 1994 bottle of bottle conditioned Thomas Hardy ale?.....Does anyone have any experience of using yeast from old beers?..or maybe the possible viability and survivability of such yeast.....I realise of course it all depends on many factors, the ABV% of beer, the conditions and temps the beer has been kept etc...am going to purchase a small bottle just to try out as this beer seems to have an almost legendary reputation...anyone here any advice or experience in culturing old out of production beer yeasts?

What possible yeast would 'Thomas Hardy ale' have used?.....any help or advice or opinions would be interesting to hear..thanks

 

[Mark1964]

Not from beer that old but in theory it should still work. Might take a while to get going though. To be honest ive never tried from a beer that old

 

[daveb]

Well am about to do a nice barley wine... i will try and see if i can culture a yeast from one of these bottles am getting and keep this forum posted....am sure it prob wont work or offer anything of real value..am more interested through curiosity than anything else.....seeing ass beer yeasts all impart some flavour to beer and individual strains are used often used particularly for their flavour/aroma characteristics am wondering how this will go...or maybe Thomas hardy ale just used a basic commonly avaiable ale/belgian strain..i have no idea..

 

[Good Ed]

good luck with this, use a lower SG wort for your initial starter of about 1020 (normally 1030 to 1040) so maybe 15g DME for a 300ml starter

 

[The_Duke]

I know what you mean about re-using yeast. I think its great fun to do and amazing to watch the process. I think it can be quite rewarding too I guess.

I have managed to do it from a 3 year old bottle of summer lightning I found in the garage for a bit of a giggle. I haven't made a brew with it though, so I have no idea if the yeast characteristics have been maintained. The beer was a bit stale. I isolated and washed the yeast from the bottle, then streaked plated it onto SDA. I then then grew it from a single colony in SLM on a spin plate for 24 h to check viability. Re streaked it on a new plate, then inoculated a slant with a single colony. Pretty lively stuff. Its the single colony to liquid broth bit that puts the yeast through a genetic bottle neck. If the genome of the individual colony sampled is still mutation free then everything else following will be fine (for a number of generations anyhow.) You can maximize your chances of getting a "good" colony by using repeats; and by only picking colonies from the initial streak plate that exhibit good growth. It is still possible to do all this work, and then end up with a yeast that lives quite happily fermenting long chain sugars and produces no alcohol (for example). C'est la vie. I suppose after 6 years, the genome of any viable yeast in the bottle may be pretty messy. Give it a shot though, I would be interested to see the results.