How much do you brew?

[KernelCrush]

CM, it looks in the pic like you have a 1/4 flare barb coming out your carboy cap for transfer pressure.  Nice idea!  I keep losing pressure with my method and the transfer slows or stops.  What do you set your gage at?

 

[BigBry68]

I do 5 gallon all grain batches.  I have a 4 tap keezer and try to keep it stocked.  Since I am cheap, I tend to make a string of beers based on 1 yeast.  Brew 1, ferment it, when time to rack to secondary I brew the second heavier beer and pour onto first's yeast cake, and so on.

So this is very interesting to me.  Do you need to do anything other than pouring the new wort on the old yeast cake?  This is done in the primary?  I assume the beers have to be similar varieties?  How do you deal with the residual hops?

So many things to consider.

 

[BigBry68]

Hard to answer this one.  I just started in January, got a kit for Christmas from my mother.  Came with an AG batch and an extract.  Ran both of those and then tried another partial.  I didnt drink a lot of beer before but, well, um, I think I have increased significantly.  I found a local Brew Supply company and they do a recipe at 1/2 price every month, so I guess I am a one a monther right now.  With a random batch thrown in occasionally.

 

[Scott Ickes]

I do 5 gallon all grain batches.  I have a 4 tap keezer and try to keep it stocked.  Since I am cheap, I tend to make a string of beers based on 1 yeast.  Brew 1, ferment it, when time to rack to secondary I brew the second heavier beer and pour onto first's yeast cake, and so on.

So this is very interesting to me.  Do you need to do anything other than pouring the new wort on the old yeast cake?  This is done in the primary?  I assume the beers have to be similar varieties?  How do you deal with the residual hops?

So many things to consider.

Yes, you can just rack your cooled wort right onto the yeast cake of the previous primary.  I give it some oxygen, but nearly as much as when I use fresh yeast.  Some people don't worry a lot about the previous recipe.  I'm not in that group.

Not necessarily similar varieties, but ....

Some things to consider are:
You're overpitching yeast. If you don't want to overpitch yeast, then this isn't for you.
If it has a lot of hop bits, then you might not want to do so.  I bag my hops in the boil, so I don't have much in the primary, so it isn't a concern for me.
Go from lighter beers to darker beers.
Go from lower gravity to higher gravity.

Another option is to harvest yeast from the primary.  Keep it in canning jars in the refrigerator.  You can usually get 3 or 4 pint jars of yeast out of each primary.  Third or Fourth generation is usually the best.  After that, your yeast will probably start going downhill.

I did a tutorial on this a while back.  If I can find it, I'll post a link here.

Found it:  http://www.beersmith.com/forum/index.php/topic,10396.0.html

 

[KernelCrush]

You are overpitching by 100's of percent with this method.  Check out page 164 of the yeast book.  I cant believe I am memorizing page numbers.  The conclusion there is 'does it make beer?  Yes.  Does it make great beer?  No.  I clean my fermenter and my yeast each time.

 

[Scott Ickes]

You are overpitching by 100's of percent with this method.  Check out page 164 of the yeast book.  I cant believe I am memorizing page numbers.  The conclusion there is 'does it make beer?  Yes.  Does it make great beer?  No.  I clean my fermenter and my yeast each time.

I do agree.  The only time I've done it, was when I made my Tootsie Roll Stout.  That one had a starting gravity of 1.142, so a huge amount of yeast was necessary.  With the intense chocolate flavor and high alcohol content (16.5% ABV), any off flavors from overpitching would be completely hidden by the chocolate and alcohol, in my humble opinion.

 

[Maine Homebrewer]

I neither pitch onto the cake nor do I store yeast in mason jars. What I try to do is rack and brew on the same day.  I reserve a half cup or so of sludge when I rack to be used later the same day.  This allows me to get three or four batches off of one package of yeast.

 

[KernelCrush]

for the heck of it I plugged 2 uses of pitch on cake into brewers friend.  after 2 uses it is showing almost 10 times the normal rate. That doesn't factor in cell death of course, or stressed live ones.  I am messing next weekend with underpitching somewhat with very fresh yeast and very small (almost no growth) starter. 

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[KernelCrush]

What I try to do is rack and brew on the same day.

Ive been doing the same.  It really sucks when you HAVE to brew when your yeast is ready.  Terrible.

 

[Scott Ickes]

for the heck of it I plugged 2 uses of pitch on cake into brewers friend.  after 2 uses it is showing almost 10 times the normal rate. That doesn't factor in cell death of course, or stressed live ones.  I am messing next weekend with underpitching somewhat with very fresh yeast and very small (almost no growth) starter. 

attach screen shot

That's 1,844,000,000,000 yeast cells (1844 billion)!  That many yeast cells will chew through a wort very quickly.  It's like putting 10,000 head of cattle on one acre of land.  Not ideal for the land or the cattle!