I take a different tack, i love all you guys recycling, think it's great but i have a different problem. The Italian missus (minister of war) only drinks fizzy water... bottled mineral water to be exact. I tend to think that these bottles must be sterile so i re-use the empties to harvest the trub yeast. I drain the last litre from the fermenter to the now empty 2 litre PET.
Refridgerate overnight, and the yeast drops out. I then either bottle it in a stubbie or wake it up for a new brew...
It's still recycling but i re-use the pets only once and ditch them.
G'day all & firstly, sorry to keep banging on about this pet topic of mine, tell me to shut up & zip it if you are getting tired of it...
Just wondering a bit about this process of harvesting yeastcake. When you do it this way flattop, with the half- full 2L PET, when you decant it into smaller bottles, do you resuspend it all? Or do you tip off any of the liquid, or target any particular layer? I've seen a few other articles and posts a while back, but I thought I'd just ask the way you do it, as I'm curious about this whole thing. (Can't you tell??
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The way I reuse a yeastcake, once the brew is off, is to agitate the last litre or so of a brew to stir up the cake, tip that into a few steamed (then cooled of course) 500ml Schotts (usually I get about 300ml in two or three of them) put them in the fridge and when it comes time to reuse one, I allow it half a day at room temp to wake up and then put it into a 250ml starter in a 500ml bottle.
Now, just to give you an indication of how starters can be manipulated, yesterday I put on a darkish ESB k&b on with a largish and evidently quite vigorous Nottingham starter. On Friday I transferred a brew to secondary and just harvested about 400ml of the Nottingham cake into a Schott. Not much liquid, it was fairly thick like custard, refrigerated it overnight, took it back out yesterday morning and just left it on the bench near the stove to wake up from its brief slumber- I could've left it out overnight, but I wasn't sure when I was going to need it. Anyway, once my starter (300ml + 3tsp malt extract in a 1 litre bottle) had cooled to <30degC, I tipped in the cake and it was bubbling gently within fifteen minutes, but I left it to multiply for about four hours, by which point it was bubbling merrily. So, I pitched it at about 5pm yesterday and by 3am this morning when I got up for a slash, I couldn't help myself and took a peek and to my surprise, even at 18 degC, it has a well- developed krausen, the clingfilm is bulging and gravity is down from 1.044 to 1.038 already. Here's a couple of happy snaps, pretty impressive for just half a day's fermenting, I think you'd agree:
But I do hope that this experiment is still worthwhile taste- wise, I know there are probably a few reasons not to overpitch, but I just couldn't help myself... its worth it, even if just to see the Nottingham going completely beserk! Hmmm, maybe a blowoff tube will have to go on this one and at this rate I could be racking or even bottling it at teatime! :lol: