Jamil...I'm soooooo confused!

[Thirsty Boy]

Just wondering if you can save some old yeast from the bottom of your fermentor to use as nutrient for your fermentation or starter. Maybe freeze it in an ice cube tray and toss a cube or 2 in when you are boiling your starter or your brew?

I've heard of people tossing in a packet of dried yeast as nutrients. Would frozen be any different? Its not like they have to be viable if you are gonna boil em anyway.

Or would the yeasties guts have a lot of off flavours as well a nutrients and its just a bad idea.

[Mr.Cheese]

[quote="Thirsty Boy"]Maybe freeze it in an ice cube tray and toss a cube or 2 in when you are boiling your starter or your brew? [/quote]

Unless you can flash freeze yeast they probably wont do so good, i would be interested in knowing their viability over months, mabey use an antifreeze. But i would expect they would be destroyed by sublimation (i.e. freezer burn) and punctures by ice crystals.

Yeast in a boil... oh their dead.

Mr Cheese.

[Thirsty Boy]

I'm trying kill the little buggers! Just want thier innards to use as nutirent for the (other) yeast you are growing up in your starter. Or in your fermentor. Working on the assumption that yeast that have been killed off in the freezer, while they are otherwise healthy, would contain all the nutrients required by new growing yeast, but not too many internal waste products. Boiling to sanitise out any freezer bugs and break down their poor pathetic yeastie little corpses into lovely yeast fertiliser

On the other hand, I'm sure I was on a web site somewhere, and the guy was freezing his yeast by using Glycerine as a buffer. Not sure where it was, but you could probbaly Google it up. I seem to recall that while he was getting an amount of mortality in his cultures, he was maintaining enough viable yeast to grow up a starter from. Might be worth a shot?

[zymurgest]

Try checking out what Wyeast have to say about it. In my experience, you can store yeast in the refridgerator for about a month, and in glycerol frozen for up to a year. I'm not sure if this is true for all yeast strains or not, but at least for all the strains I have used so far (mostly Wyeast) it seems to hold true, ymmv. Ttyal, and ilbcnu!

Prost!

Michel