I rarely harvest and repitch my yeast and I wanted to have a reality check on how much to pitch into a barleywine I'm planning.
In the photo below you can see the yeast I harvested from 5.5 gal 1.052 bitter. I pulled this from the primary about 1.5 weeks after pitching. I washed once and threw out the bottom 10 or 20% of sediment that looked dark and had hops in it. I poured what was left into three 1-pint mason jars.
According to the Mr Malty calculator, I need 370 billion cells, which, depending on how I set the Yeast Concentration and Non-Yeast Percentage settings, means I need 87 to 436 mL of yeast slurry...or 181 mL if I just accept the default settings. If that's right, I'll need to pitch most of the first two jars. Does that seem right? I'm just a little surprised that I need most of the yeast harvested from a full batch of beer.
Also, I am a little concerned about the quality of the yeast I have. Some of the yeast washing videos I looked explained that the good yeast is the light colored layer that settles on top. I seem to have very little of that. How much of this is good yeast?
Finally, if I'm not brewing until Sunday, should I do a small yeast starter to refresh this?
Thanks!
Hmmm...the image isn't coming through. Here's the link:
www.flickr.com/photos/89851777@N04/8168288606/in/photostream