Beer Forum

in an online article I retrieved back in February of 1998 written by Dave Whitman he discussed storing yeast cultures in distilled water for months even years.

It was from a 1-day seminar he attended at the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC) in the Washington D.C area.

I was wondering if anyone knew how valid he was concerning this issue. I have been culturing yeast for many years now and any method to further the storage life of my cultures without damaging their integrity would be appreciated. I already store my cultures on slants which have an average life of 6 months. So every 6 months I am forced to reculture to new slants.

Also, if I prepare a slant from a White Labs High Gravity yeast tube that expired 1 year ago is their any possibility that the yeast may still be living?

I have no idea, but would love to know. I'm way to lazy to deal with slants.

Travis

I store my yeast under sterile water following the methodology outlined in the article on www.craftbrewer.org

It is supposed to be suitable for up to two years storage.

One strong point of this method is culturing on media in petri dishes and selecting individual colonies based on macro appearance.

Note that the water is plain tap water that is sterile, not distilled water.

If your tube of high grav yeast has been stored in the fridge, I am pretty sure you could streak it onto a petri plate and then onto slants.