Man, I'm always amazed at how this forum supports my brewing. Right now I'm cold-crashing an O-fest, with plans to repitch the 34/70 into a Munich Dunkel tomorrow. I think that as long as the initial fermentation was clean and healthy, the slurry should be in better shape than the original dry pack. Maybe I'm vastly oversimplifying things here.
One thing that I recently picked up here was the idea of overbuilding starters in order to maintain a cleaner yeast culture. I've been using that method a lot in my brewing, and I like it a lot. So, the downside with repitching is the gamble of contamination. I plan to reserve a clean portion of my yeast slurry from the Ofest as my "pure" culture, and then build that through starters for future lagers.
However, a whole batch worth of lager slurry is way to valuable to just dump, so I see myself overbuilding a starter, brewing a batch, then using the slurry for a second batch or two. I don't brew lagers that often, but I'm definitely going to keep moving forward with this method as a way to simplify lager production.
PS - doesn't dry yeast pretty much turn to liquid once you use it?
