Yeast cake.

[Baldbrewer]

HI All,
are there any guidelines to pitching onto another batches yeast cake?
Do you half the cake then harvest the rest?
Do you pitch the yeast cake into a clean FV then pour fresh wort onto this?
Can you only use the yeast cake for the same brews? i.e. AG#3 TTL yeast cake(notts) for AG#4 TTL? or AG#3 TTL yeast cake(notts) for AG#4 Sara Hughes Ruby mild?

any advice gladly welcomed especially from Gray's!

 

[graysalchemy]

I don't think you need my advice, but Aleman has just posted on my thread that you should use 100ml per 25L of wort.

I save the yeast cake and wash it in cooled boiled water. You are ment to seperate out the layers and ther is plenty about the subject on here. However i tend to wash and put back in a bottle. My last one was left for a 6 weeks. I did make up a starter to awaken the yeast (wish I hadn't bothered :lol: ) then pitched it into the wort.

With regards to using the same yeast cake for the same brew well I always keep those from a pale ale and bitter and as long as the yeast is appropriate pitch on to anything. However I don't keep the yeast back from stouts because of strong colour and tastes or anything of high gravity as the yeast will be past its best.

Also I may be hesitant about re pitching a yeast from a hoppy ale into something more malty as some of the hop may come over, I don't know if this is true but just precautionary. But in any case i use us-05 in a pale which I would want to pitch in my bitter I brew.

Hope that helps

 

[Baldbrewer]

thanks Gray's

 

[graysalchemy]

:thumb: :thumb:

 

[puravida]

More through laziness than anything else I have on occasion racked a beer out of the primary into a keg and then dumped fresh cooled wort straight from my BIAB pot straight back into the FV on top of the yeast cake with all the crud and mess still in there. I'll only re-use the yeast cake once and the it gets binned.

My advice is to leave plenty of headspace and have a good airlock as it takes off like Vesuvius!

 

[Asalpaws]

I've also had pretty good experiance with re using cakes. I also just dump the new wort onto the old yeast cake. It works well if you know you are gonna brew two weekends in a row. For example I've done a light ale one weekend and then racked this off to secondary next weekend, I then pitched the higher gravity wort on top of the yeast cake and off you go. Works great as you have huge numbers of yearsties to handle the high gravity wort. I did a thread on it after some advice from Greys and co