This could, at worst, ruin a batch and possibly fermenter, and at best, might hurt the quality of your finished beer. If you harvest yeast from the slurry of a previous batch and something found its way into the batch, your basically combining those strains and making a starter out of them, then pitching them into a new batch. Right off the bat, there’s the increased chance of infection. When you’re harvesting yeast, you may run into a few problems that can be detrimental to your beer. You may also not want to spend money on shipping, and your LHBS is out of the way. Even if it is commercially available, it may be a seasonal strain or one that is often sold out. It’s also how people gets the Bell’s house yeast, since Oberon is low gravity and unfiltered. For a long time, this was how most people got a hold of the Conan yeast from Heady Topper. Second, if, like me, you like trying unique yeasts that aren’t commercially available, you can harvest yeast from unfiltered bottles. By harvesting yeast, you can continue making starters and building up to your cell count, so you’ll only be buying the ingredients to make your starter wort. That’s two fresh smack packs, pretty pricey. Most standard ale pitching rates (.75 million cells per mL per degree plato) would recommend almost 200 billion cells of yeast for a 5 gallon, 1.055 OG batch. Some Prosįirst off, yeast can get pricey. This can be done for a variety of reasons, a few of which I’ve mentioned. Yeast harvesting is the practice of culturing yeast from a previous batch, yeast pack, or bottle with the intention of building up the cell count and pitching it again. To alleviate the costs of yeast, and to gather some unique strains, many brewers begin harvesting their yeast. On top of this, I collect yeast like some people collect stamps, and I love culturing yeast from bottles that may not be commercially available.
If I didn’t make starters, it would be somewhere in the $80 a month range to hit the proper cell counts. I brew about twice a month and almost always use liquid yeast, so that’s almost $20 a month in yeast alone. At my local homebrew shop, a smack-pack of WYeast is about $9, and a fresh packet of dry yeast is $4.50. If you’ve been brewing for a while you’ve probably noticed how quickly the price of yeast stacks up.
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