Harvesting Yeast from Primary Fermentation

The yeast here was harvested from the primary fermentation of Barney's Back. Its noteworthy to mention that there were 2 packs of dry wheat beer yeast pitched initially into the carboy to start primary fermentation. The primary was only 6 days in duration, before moving it to a secondary and adding berries. Primary was cut short just to ensure there were still plenty of yeast in suspension to take care of the sugars that the berries added. The yeast was still very active at this point. Although, this lead to a bit of a mess when harvesting because there were still sugars to cause some havoc in the mason jars that I used as harbors for the harvest.


To start, I siphoned the beer from the primary to a 6 gallon bucket (this is the bucket that I used to add the berries). I avoided siphoning all of the trub/sediment from the bottom of the carboy. A few days prior to this I had sterilized a few quarts of water by boiling over the stove. This water I stored in the fridge sterile mason jars. This was really helpful as the water was already cool and nearly ready to go - but not entirely ready to go - I wanted to warm the water up to room temperature. I warmed the sterile water jars up with an 80°F water submersion in a medium sized bowl. 


Once the water was room temperature, and the carboy was siphoned, I dumped a pint of water into the carboy. Then while shaking the carboy, I used the water to loosen the trub/sediment. As it loosened, I poured it into an empty sterile mason jar. I then added a little more water to the carboy, shaking and then dumping the loosened slurry into the mason jar. I was able to fill up two pint sized mason jars with yeast slurry. I then capped the two pints and let them sit over night in the refrigerator. 

After about 24 hours of sitting in an undisturbed environment, the trub and yeast will settle below the water. These layers will be distinct in the jar -- water at the top, yeast in the middle, then trub at the bottom. The yeast is the white layer.

Basically, that is the yeast cake which is ready to pitch into the next batch. 

Before pitching into the next batch, I washed the yeast about 4 times, and made a yeast starter with this yeast cake. 

Washing the yeast will clarify the yeast from debris and dirt. I did this probably 3 or 4 times before making the yeast starter. Washing the yeast is simply explained as this: 
1. Let settle for 24 hours
2. Dump the top layer of water out of the jar
3. Add clean, sterile water back into the jar
4. Shake up the jar so that the trub, yeast and water are mixed again
5. Let settle for 24 hours.
6. Repeat steps as many times as necessary.