Yeast Washing

For a while now I've been using liquid yeasts from Wyeast. These yeasts are imported from the USA and therefore they are fairly expensive. One way of reducing the impact of these costs is to re-use the yeast from one brew in one or more other brews. For my recent barley wine (Grandad Joe's Gold Label) I re-used the entire yeast cake from my brew of Palliser Pride. However, in most cases I would not want to use so much yeast for one brew, so I've investigated harvesting and washing the yeast at the end of the brew (in order to separate the good yeast from the proteins, hop bits and other gunge, known as 'trub'), and splitting it into several smaller amounts.

Today was my first shot at this. I followed the basic process from a very useful forum post but modified it slightly (I used sanitiser solution instead of boiling stuff as I didn't have enough glass jars). It went fairly smoothly although I'm concerned that I poured away too much real yeast along with the gunge at the bottom. All in all I ended up with the three jars shown above. Next time I come to brew a suitable beer (probably an English bitter of some sort) I'll make a starter using one of those jars and see how we go.