Turbo Yeast

[fergi]

hi guys,this is not exactly related to beer but,i am doing my turbo yeast for making spirits and what i would like to know is can i save the yeast at the end of my ferment and culture ENOUGH of it to keep and use in my next alcohol ferment,as it is a large pack of yeast originally turbo 48 im not sure if it would be a viable project,ie the turbo yeast has to have enough kick to ferment 8 kg sugar in 21 litres of water ,so you can see that it needs a fair whack of yeast to get the job done,im sure we have a few spirits brewers here somewhere
cheers
fergi

 

[Jovial_Monk]

I doubt it would be worth it, unless you added so many yeast nutrients it would be cheaper to buy another pack of yeast

Jovial Monk

 

[fergi]

ok thanks for that JM ,i thought that might be the case
cheers
fergi

 

[voota]

Ha, I was about 10 minutes away from asking the same question. We need about 15litres of pure spirit for a party (along with a heap of homebrew) So we were looking to cut down on turbo yeast cost, there really is no way around it, we're just going to buy 3kgs of yeast/nutrient for $100 from a shop in Qld. Can supply the details if you want fergi.

edit: I have though of the possibility of using trappist yeast (in fact i've got one in the fridge), and culturing that. What do you think JM?

 

[fergi]

thanks voota,but i figure that 100 will buy me about 9 turbo yeasts which is enough for abot 50 litres of alc, maybe i am missing somthing here
cheers
fergi

 

[voota]

Oh, i'm not going to use all that yeast at once for 10 litres. It just works out about half the price of packet yeast (per brew). Maybe I'm the one missing something?

 

[Jovial_Monk]

No way, I am afraid, distillers yeast goes where no beer yeast can, like 20%

JM

 

[pint of lager]

Easy answer, yes you can reuse it, but don't expect the same results.

A pack of turbo yeast has a lot of yeast in it, plus lots of nutrients and pH balancing stuff in the blend. The yeast is also somehow grown to cope with the stress of being chucked into a strong sugar solution which has huge osmotic pressures on the yeast cell and then, it has to cope with the stress of high alcohol concentrations at the end of fermentation.

When fermentation has finished, the yeast has had enough.

So you have to have the right amount of yeast, the right nutrients in the right balance to achieve the same results as a commercial packet. If you had the time and the right gear, you could experiment on and find this out.

Go and do some research on homedistiller website which has a huge amount of information.