Pitching onto a yeast cake,

[Richard Rice]

I currently have a Guinness Clone sitting in my fridge.  In a 25 Litre batch, there is a little over 1Litre of trub/yeast cake.  My brother-in-law wants to use the yeast cake to pitch his stout.

 

However, his stout will be a double stout (at least 8% - expecting an OG of 1.080) and we plan to age it on woodchips in a secondary fermenter.  I used S04 and it fermented out really fast and the samples I have taken taste fantastic.

 

Are we running the risk of over-pitching?  Or considering his beer will be double the gravity of mine, and with his new set up we only have a small amount of trub, should it be about right.  Does it matter if there is some astringency cos we will be aging on wood chips?

[Crusader-Rob]

I've pitched beers straight into the yeast cake, without even trying to harvest. I even did it with a beer of the same gravity... it worked, and I could taste no off flavours.

But given you are trying to do a beer double in gravity almost, I think you'll be fine. Most people would recommend washing the yeast first. Which I'd normally agree with.

[Richard Rice]

We've been using slurry often enough and it's been fine - not bothered washing the yeast and had some really good feedback about our beers!

We're trying to also figure out how we get the slurry to the right temp - we normally cold crash our beers for a day or two but considering how clear my samples have been I wonder if I even need to...

 

[Peter Smith]

http://www.mrmalty.com/calc/calc.html    I normaly pour the slurry from last batch into a 1L jug and sit it in fridge next to the carboy I am about to pitch into,  once the carboy is at pitching temp you just pour in the amount required....   for lagers this can take 12hours to cool a 46L batch down to 10C

[Richard Rice]

awesome, thanks!

[jt]

+1 for Mr Malty