# AHB Articles: Long Term Storage of Yeast in Distilled Water



## Wolfy (23/7/10)

This is the discussion topic for article: Long Term Storage of Yeast in Distilled Water

As noted in the article, many home brewing yeast farmers extend the 'recommended' storage times for each of the various techniques mentioned.
Small amounts of yeast can remain viable for many months when stored under beer.
When using agar slants, although a fair amount of autolysis is noticed after a few months, it is usually possible to reculture and reuse agar slants a year old.
However, once they have been made, yeast stored in small samples of distilled water take up very little room and should be easy to store and reuse (especially if there are a number of yeast strains to be maintained) over long periods of time.

The _Brewing Techniques_ magazine article "_A Simple,Practical Method for Long Term Storage of Yeast_" is not available on the _Brewing Techniques_ website, but there may scanned copies of the individual article available via file sharing sites/services.


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## bigfridge (23/7/10)

Wolfy said:


> This is the discussion topic for article: Long Term Storage of Yeast in Distilled Water
> 
> As noted in the article, many home brewing yeast farmers extend the 'recommended' storage times for each of the various techniques mentioned.
> Small amounts of yeast can remain viable for many months when stored under beer.
> ...




Hi,

I don't have the time to lookup the original article or the other sources that I have found - but I do recall that you should not use distilled water. You need the salts in normal tap water to control osmosis.

HTH,
Dave


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## Fourstar (23/7/10)

also on a nother note, dont go out and use the water designed for irons etc. This is *deminerased *water and is not sterile distilled water from what i have been led to believe. You are probabaly better off just boiling the arse out of some water, cooling it and using that instead.


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## Wolfy (23/7/10)

Both the included articles and those referenced from the magazine article are quite specific about using distilled water.
I believe the reason is to force the yeast into hibernation and stop all metabolic activity (much like cryogenic storage the author suggests).
However, I don't know if the same applies when using normal tap water with various salts/ions, if tap water is actually better, or if they only specify distilled water because the articles are written by those using laboratory situations and supplies.


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## dreadhead (23/5/11)

Sorry to dig up an old topic, but this seemed most relevent to my question.
In the Yeast book (White & Zainasheff), when transferring yeast for distilled water storage they mention that a match head sized section of a colony should be added to 2-3ml of water. In my case I will be transferring directly from a liquid Wyeast pack. So just wondering how much liquid culture should I aim to transfer?. Obviously I want to transfer enough yeast to maintain viability for a long period, but don't want massive numbers so I can still discern individual colonies when plating without further dilutions. I have access to micropipettes and inoculation loops, so volumes down to 1 microlitre can be used.

Cheers


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## Wolfy (23/5/11)

I'd just dip the inoculation loop into the yeast slurry in the Wyeast pack and use that, essentially just a 'bubble' of yeast on the tip of the loop.


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## Hassles (15/11/15)

Having recently harvested yeast (Cooper's Vintage and Sparkling ales, Chimay & others) and stored in plastic vials under distilled water I found very quickly that they would not enliven when placed into a starter solution and a couple of weeks later were "all obviously dead" eg: chocolate dark brown and darker around the periphery :-( It's back to the drawing board!!


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## Yob (15/11/15)

Hassles said:


> Having recently harvested yeast (Cooper's Vintage and Sparkling ales, Chimay & others) and stored in plastic vials under distilled water I found very quickly that they would not enliven when placed into a starter solution and a couple of weeks later were "all obviously dead" eg: chocolate dark brown and darker around the periphery :-( It's back to the drawing board!!


Have a search for "let's freeze some yeast"

Recently used some yeast 18 months old and fermented like mad...


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## Weizguy (16/11/15)

Hassles said:


> Having recently harvested yeast (Cooper's Vintage and Sparkling ales, Chimay & others) and stored in plastic vials under distilled water I found very quickly that they would not enliven when placed into a starter solution and a couple of weeks later were "all obviously dead" eg: chocolate dark brown and darker around the periphery :-( It's back to the drawing board!!


If I harvest yeast from bottled beer, I always attempt to culture it before using or thinking about storing it. Bottled beer yeast often has a low viability.
If I was going to store under water, I would culture the yeast first in dilute wort and then chill the culture, and remove an aliquot of yeast into the sterile storage container with the sterile distilled water (multiple times).

Or just visit the thread mentioned in the above post.


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