Beer Forum

What does everyone think about leaving their yeast in the carboy, over and over again?

Is it a new generation if it does not get "repiched"?

OK, this is what I have done...

I had old yeast in the fridge that I didn't think I would ever use... 4 of them... one 5 months old, 4, 3, and 2 months old. Sooo... I picked up a gallon of unfiltered pasturized apple juice, and piched all four in to the carboy. Two weeks later siphoned off the cider and poured in another gallon. I have done this four times, spanning 2 months the yeast has not gone any more than 5-10 min with out some type of liquid in it.

Right now the cider has been tasting good... but how long can this last?

depends mostly on your sanitation practices and yeast mutation rate. eventually the yeast will mutate to a point that they either do not produce the flavors you want, do not fully attenuate and/or do not fully floculate. and even with the best sanitation practices you will probably one day introduce some bug or wild yeast that will run rampant on your cider. but as long as things are fermenting ok and everything tastes good go ahead and keep recycling. however as a rule of thumb you should not expect to get more than about 6 re-pitches before things start turning south.

also, by pitching on top of the old slurry you may not be getting proper yeast growth that you would normally get. this may negatively affect the flavors that the yeast contribute. but as long as it tastes good...

are you gonna try and make beer with this yeast or just continue with ciders, because you probably trained them to eat fructose. they might not like maltose as much as they used to assuming this was beer yeast to start with.

It was all beer yeast from past batches. They were all different types. An English Ale, British Ale, Belgian Wit, and Kolsch. I pictured the carboy as the Roman Colosseum, throwing in my Gladiators and seeing what happened... and my way of turning out some cheap cider.

I don't plan on risking this new beast on a new fresh batch of wort. It's strictly cider for it now.

I don't plan on washing the yeast. But do you think it would make a difference if it started to go south? Could it help fix the problem(or taste better).

Or at that point it's not worth it, just start over?

SirNixalot wrote:It was all beer yeast from past batches. They were all different types. An English Ale, British Ale, Belgian Wit, and Kolsch. I pictured the carboy as the Roman Colosseum, throwing in my Gladiators and seeing what happened...

What's cool about this, is that it's an awesome selective pressure/competition experiment. Goes along with stuff that Dr. Michael Lewis was saying in his talk at NHC this year, about getting the most ideal yeast for the beer you're brewing. While I'm with the guy who said earlier that you'd have them trained for fructose or at least weakened as far as maltose goes, for your ciders I'd say to go as long as you can. I mean up until they start to go south, every batch gets more and more acclimated to the cider you're doing (if you keep the recipe the same) and you've got a new "house cider yeast" better suited than really anything you'd ever buy. You could theoretically set aside some sort of master stock culture too where you make a starter with some, split it four ways or more, and then use each of those. Hard to explain without a diagram, but do some sort of tree branching kinda thing, and you'll get it to last longer for you. Hell, if it keeps on doing well you might even wanna figure out how to freeze it and bank the new strain you've kinda worked up.

Although a thing to remember about banking such a strain is that you'd want to do it as a frozen liquid culture, you wouldn't want to have some sort of plate or something like that where you could pick single colonies, you'd want to keep the blend intact.

You could do all that with beers too, even develop the yeast to specific recipes or styles. I don't know if it's just me but that sort of thing really interests me.

Are you pitching on the cake every time or are you rinsing the yeast?
If your not rinsing you have all that apple pulp and dead yeast accumulating in your carboy...