Washing spent yeast slurry using water requires effort and is not necessarily beneficial to resting, lipid-depleted yeast cells or to virgin cells (up to 50% of the population) that seem to lack fully functional membranes. If repitching batch to batch, ideally yeast should be top cropped, to harvest clean, healthy yeast cells. This is the traditional way, as used long before brewing became a serious science. Many traditional breweries continue to use top cropping today, because it works very well, but most use science too, to monitor yeast health then start fresh (Emil-Hansen style) when necessary. I use the technique myself when it suits. The top-cropped yeast need to be repitched within a few days. Otherwise a small volume of the harvested yeast in a starter is required, which, strictly speaking, is not ‘repitching’, in the sense that it is not reusing healthy yeast with minimal effort and minimal cost. The attached pic shows one of my top-cropped samples from a fermentation (23L @ 1.055). A little fermenting wort (‘barm ale’) keeps the yeast ‘happy’ until repitched. The sooner they are repitched the better. In fact, if repitched immediately, personal protective equipment might be required! There are about 140 billion cells in the sample I top cropped. Assuming a brewer’s standard pitching rate of 6 million viable cells/ml wort this is sufficient to ferment another 23L @ 1.055 in 3-4 days. I find it strange that Mr Malty recommends 233 billion cells for this fermentation. The pitching rate calculator on Brewer’s Friend seems to be more accurate, if ‘fresh yeast only’ is selected. How these calculators guess viable cell counts in spent slurries , with any degree of accuracy to prescribe volumes to pitch, is beyond me.
Vedlegg
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