BigBry68 said:
Beer_Tigger said:
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