Struggling to get much growth in yeast starters, what am I doing wrong?

[Spoon]

So I tried the 'new' yeast harvesting method with a wheat beer last week with a view to making a Berliner Weiss with 5l of wort I kept behind in a Demi-John. The plan is to sour it first, boil it again, then ferment it. So the plan was simply to start with the '1-2cm' of yeast collected by the new method, and just pitch it straight in.

But, even after cold crashing there was barely 1mm of yeast in the bottle. The beer's still hazey, but it is a hefeweizen so to be expected, it's not a folculating yeast.

So into a 1l bottle with 500ml of boiled and cooled 1.040 wort with pinch of nutrient in it. Shaken up, left in the fridge for 36hours, cold crashed, but not masses of growth.

Decanted, added another 500ml of 1.040, shaken, it's fermenting again, but I'm still not getting a lovely thick yeast cake in the bottom of the bottle.

So question is, do I persevere and keep going, or accept that something wasn't right, drink one of the now bottled Hefe's and use the yeast in the bottom of those bottles to start again? Local homebrew shop doesn't have any wheat beer yeast and it's not worth ordering more + postage just for one demi-john (which may or may not be going off just sat there).

Problems I'm considering:
1) do multiple steps count as generations of the yeast, I know you're not supposed to use the same tub indefinitely as it puts selective pressure on the yeast. Will having done 3-4 steps in the starter be affecting the yeast?

2) Will anything be going wrong with the wort sat there in the demi john? It went in hot and there's an airlock with starsan in it which isn't bubbling so appears sanitary, and it's just sat under the kitchen table.

 

[MyQul]

So into a 1l bottle with 500ml of boiled and cooled 1.040 wort with pinch of nutrient in it. Shaken up, left in the fridge for 36hours, cold crashed, but not masses of growth.

Am I correct in thinking/reading you tried to grow your starter in the fridge? If you did, that's the reason you didn't get any growth. You need to grow it at room temp

 

[Covrich]

Are you shaking your starters? keep gyrating and shaking them to help aid growth..

Also this may be mis read but you put your second setp was you pitched it and left to crash in teh fridge.. I assume you let it ferment out in the warm right?

edit myqul beat me to it!

 

[MyQul]

I've not tried the "new" method on a weiss beer strain. So perhaps this method isn't suitable for this type of yeast as it's not very flocctuant?

1mm of yeast is usually what I get in a normal bottle of HB after I've done a normal bottling. I have also cutltured up yeast from my own bottles. I do four step ups. 2x250ml 1.040 then 2x2L 1.040. So keep going

Problem 1

As your putting virtually all the yeast cells into each step up rom the previous step up your not putting any selective pressure on it in a similar way you would do with bottom cropping

Problem 2

No. Basically your making unhopped beer, as starter and we leave our beers in FV's for 2 or more weeks to ferment . So a starter left for a few days is fine. As long as it's got the air lock/covered no microbes are getting in and the lower PH of the starter/unhopped beer helps protect itself

 

[Spoon]

sorry, when I said fridge, I meant the 'fermentation chamber' (fridge + greenhouse heater + STC1000 etc).

It's fermenting with the rest of the beers at 20C, I let it go for 36hours, then cold crashed it for 12, then repeated.

Doing it in a 1l bottle with 500ml of wort, giving it a good shake, opening the top swapping the air, closing it up, giving it a god shake and releasing the cap before putting it in to ferment.

Not sure if 'the method' is particularly unsuitable for wheat beer yeasts, or if it's the process of stepping up is just going to take longer because each time less floculates out?

I'll do a 2l starter in a demijohn and see how that turns out.

 

[MyQul]

Given time almost the cells should flocc out in the fridge when crashing

I think it's the fact you didnt collect much yeast in the first place is the problem. When I tried the method with notty I got a good couple of cm's of yeast. This would be enough to just put into 2L of starter.

 

[MyQul]

If you still want to keep the strain but dont want to do this method again you could do what I have started to do;

After the last 2L step up, instead of pitching it into your beer get a long handles spoon or somthing and give it a good stir to suspend all the yeast in the starter. Then syphon the starter into 4x500ml bottles. Each one of these bottles is now what you attempted to acheive with the "new method" and can each be pitched into a 2L starter and then bottom cropped about 6 times. Giving you (6x4) 24 brews worth of yeast
In fact the last bottle of the four can be put into 2L of starter wort and itself split into 4 again. Thus giving you even more brews worth. I'm not sure how many times you can do this but as your 4 way splits have most of the cells and your not putting an selective pressure on the split 2L starter, you can do it many times. Brulosophy site has done something similar and gone to 13 generations.

 

[Simonh82]

I think you can do it, but it might be problematic for a small batch like yours. If I were going for a 23L batch, I would just step it up without decanting off the spent wort. Hefe yeast are so unfloculent that I think you will struggle to get them to sediment in a reasonable time after each step. By decanting off, you are probably losing 80% of you yeast cells, taking you back to square one.

If you've got say 500ml, I'd add 1L of starter wort to it and use a demijohn or 5L water bottle to ferment it out in. Then just add another 1.5L to make a 3L starter. At that point you probably are going to have to do something to get the yeast out of suspension so a long cold crash would be your best bet unless you have a 5 micron filter to hand.

Just my 2p.

 

[Covrich]

I think rather than just let it ferment out in the fridge alone I would shake them regular throughout the day to help encourage growth.

I have top cropped a belgian wit which is low flocculation but still have got it to build up.

 

[Spoon]

If you've got say 500ml, I'd add 1L of starter wort to it and use a demijohn or 5L water bottle to ferment it out in. Then just add another 1.5L to make a 3L starter.

I might try this, I'll cold crash another bottle as I'm starting to worry that what's collecting in the bottom of the bottle is just the trub from DME. Then do a 1.020 100ml starter in a jam jar, then pitch that into 250ml of 1.040, 500ml, 1l etc.

When doing that do you compensate for the volume of the previous starter when calculating gravity. e.g. 250ml starter + 500ml of 1.055 = 750ml of 1.040? Or just keep adding more of the same wort.

 

[Simonh82]

When I've done similar, I just top up with standard strength wort. I successfully harvested Duvel yeast recently which is low flocculating but not as bad as a hefe yeast.

I started with bottle dregs and added 100ml of 1.020, then 200ml then 300ml, each time without decanting. I then added 1L of 1.040 wort. After that I was decanting a bit, but as it was so low flocculating, I was cautious and left about half of the spent wort.

 

[Richie_asg1]

So into a 1l bottle with 500ml of boiled and cooled 1.040 wort with pinch of nutrient in it. Shaken up, left in the fridge for 36hours, cold crashed, but not masses of growth.

If you are not starting out with much, I would go to a smaller container of say 50ml, such as a boiling tube and use a sterilised cotton wool plug. Then when that gets cloudy and active you can add it to your 500ml bottle.
Try mixing it up before taking a 10ml liquid sample into it, as the layer on the base may be dead.

You may be getting some multiplication but because it is in such a large bottle it may take weeks rather than days to see anything happen.

...Just my thoughts on it. :-?

 

[Spoon]

Well that's settled it (kinda)

Drank a beer last night in the name of yeast harvesting (it's a tough gig) and dropped the slurry and about 50ml of beer into 250ml of wort. It's easily doubled in volume overnight and floculated to the bottom, and the beer is still cloudy so lots more in suspension.

Somehow whatever I harvested from the fermenting wort is viable enough to ferment each starter but not it seems multiply at any significant rate? Doesn't taste infected, but there are some hard lumps of something other than yeast in the bottom, almost gravelly, maybe whatever trub they are is having an effect.