What are your yeast brink SOPs?

[PCQC]

We just got a yeast brink with load cells and there is so little in the literature about proper yeast procedure with a yeast brink. What are your SOPs with generation, harvesting from cones, and pitching by weight?

Cheers!

[Bogan]

I am interested in this information as well.

[jcrjustin]

Where did you get your yeast brink from? Did it come with a mixer?

[Bogan]

Haven't bought one yet.

[Paul Philippon]

Bump

I'd love to have any information anyone can offer on this topic. We also have a yeast brink on load cells with mechanical agitation (purchased second hand - manufactured by McDonald Stainless). Thanks!

Paul Philippon
The Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery
Farmville NC
paul@duckrabbitbrewery.com

[jcrjustin]

Paul-

Do you have any more information on your yeast brink? A quick google search turned up nothing regarding McDonald Stainless. Thanks

[mswebb]

Paul-

Do you have any more information on your yeast brink? A quick google search turned up nothing regarding McDonald Stainless. Thanks

McDonald Steel is HDP Canada. Their website doesn't have a great deal of info on yeast systems but they are listed as a product.

We are about to install HDP brewhouse, fermenters and brites and may pick up some yeast systems from them as well once we're operational.

[Yeast]

We just got a yeast brink with load cells and there is so little in the literature about proper yeast procedure with a yeast brink. What are your SOPs with generation, harvesting from cones, and pitching by weight?

Cheers!

pitching by weight can be horribly inaccurate depending on how it's done. you have to chart each recipe/brand and make assumptions on viability.

here's my yeast brink visual sop. if you want to talk about what you might be able to do with the equipment you have some pictures might help

http://discussions.probrewer.com/showthread.php?55695-Harvesting-in-Half-Barrel-Keg-Brinks-%28SOP%29-for-the-community

you might also have a look at this

http://discussions.probrewer.com/showthread.php?55700-Laboratory-propegation-and-Brewery-propegation-of-yeast-(SOPs)

[Paul Philippon]

Thanks

Yeast,

Thanks for the information and for the links. My intention in purchasing the yeast brink was to allow us to pitch from a uniform slurry (uniform due to the mechanical agitation of the mixer) which could be tested for viability and cell counts. My thought was that this would allow us much more accurately to pitch the desired number of viable cells. If we know (by testing with, e.g., methylene blue) that the slurry contains, for example, 98% viable cells, and we know that the slurry consists of X number of cells per mL, with one L of slurry weighing Y, we should be able to calculate exactly what weight of slurry to pitch to achieve 1,000,000 cells / mL / degree P.

Without a brink that would render the slurry uniform (by very gentle mixing), any sample we test for viability and cell count wouldn't be considered representative of the whole.

I suppose the questions I have about yeast brink SOPs include:

Where do you set the paramaters on your mixer? e.g. do you program the mixing blade to turn at 15 rpm for one minute out of every ten minutes (I'm making up numbers here)?

Supposing that you'll use the yeast from the brink within 24 hours, do you fill it with as little supernatant beer as possible, or do you store under beer? Is the answer the same if the time frame is 36 hours?

Do you push yeast out with CO2 top pressure, or do you transfer using something like a peristaltic pump (or some other method)?

Thanks in advance for any advice. I am, of course, open to knowing any other relevant SOPs about which is didn't occur to me to ask!

Cheers,

Paul Philippon
The Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery
Farmville NC
paul@duckrabbitbrewery.com

[Fausto Yu-Shan]

Yeast Harvest and Pitching

Depends on the method you want to follow at your brewery.

At a brewery that I worked before in Germany on open fermenters, the method was to propagate the yeast for every batch similar to the one described before by YEAST, later the slurry yeast was discarded.

Another method is, once you harvest yeast from a fermentation vessel to the yeast brink, the program proceeds to mix it for an established time, than you take a sample to spin down in a centrifuge to calculate the amount of yeast in it as you mention in your post. Obviously, you may make assumptions on the viability, type of yeast, etc. Besides you washed it with Food Grade Phosphoric Acid or any product of your preference, mix again for an established period of time, and the slurry yeast is ready to be used, likewise the temperature is lowered. Once it is pitched and at end of knock out you can take a wort sample from the fermenter to verified the cell count.
You can keep it for 2 days with no problem, if you need to keep it for a week or more than you may add beer and pressurized it with CO2.
If plan to use it soon, than calculate the amount to pitch in pounds or BBL. It can be pushed with sterile O2 or with a pump depends on your system and amount.

At the brewery we do it every day with no problem.

[Yeast]

Yeast,

Thanks for the information and for the links. My intention in purchasing the yeast brink was to allow us to pitch from a uniform slurry (uniform due to the mechanical agitation of the mixer) which could be tested for viability and cell counts. My thought was that this would allow us much more accurately to pitch the desired number of viable cells. If we know (by testing with, e.g., methylene blue) that the slurry contains, for example, 98% viable cells, and we know that the slurry consists of X number of cells per mL, with one L of slurry weighing Y, we should be able to calculate exactly what weight of slurry to pitch to achieve 1,000,000 cells / mL / degree P.

Without a brink that would render the slurry uniform (by very gentle mixing), any sample we test for viability and cell count wouldn't be considered representative of the whole.

I suppose the questions I have about yeast brink SOPs include:

Where do you set the paramaters on your mixer? e.g. do you program the mixing blade to turn at 15 rpm for one minute out of every ten minutes (I'm making up numbers here)?

Supposing that you'll use the yeast from the brink within 24 hours, do you fill it with as little supernatant beer as possible, or do you store under beer? Is the answer the same if the time frame is 36 hours?

Do you push yeast out with CO2 top pressure, or do you transfer using something like a peristaltic pump (or some other method)?

Thanks in advance for any advice. I am, of course, open to knowing any other relevant SOPs about which is didn't occur to me to ask!

Cheers,

Paul Philippon
The Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery
Farmville NC
paul@duckrabbitbrewery.com

I've stored yeast in brinks for over a week. If you harvest on water say 20-25% water in the brink it keeps the viability and vitality longer in storage.
It's best to mix your brinks daily by hand (in my case) if they're being stored for longer than a couple days. Sample the brinks for pitching calculation right before using as the pH will rise every day little by little.

Methylene blue is accurate til about 80-90% of you get 85% viability using methylene blue it may be actually more like 50% alive 50% dead. So Ph readings are good to keep tabs on.

[PCQC]

Yeast,

Thanks for the information and for the links. My intention in purchasing the yeast brink was to allow us to pitch from a uniform slurry (uniform due to the mechanical agitation of the mixer) which could be tested for viability and cell counts. My thought was that this would allow us much more accurately to pitch the desired number of viable cells. If we know (by testing with, e.g., methylene blue) that the slurry contains, for example, 98% viable cells, and we know that the slurry consists of X number of cells per mL, with one L of slurry weighing Y, we should be able to calculate exactly what weight of slurry to pitch to achieve 1,000,000 cells / mL / degree P.

Without a brink that would render the slurry uniform (by very gentle mixing), any sample we test for viability and cell count wouldn't be considered representative of the whole.

I suppose the questions I have about yeast brink SOPs include:

Where do you set the paramaters on your mixer? e.g. do you program the mixing blade to turn at 15 rpm for one minute out of every ten minutes (I'm making up numbers here)?

Supposing that you'll use the yeast from the brink within 24 hours, do you fill it with as little supernatant beer as possible, or do you store under beer? Is the answer the same if the time frame is 36 hours?

Do you push yeast out with CO2 top pressure, or do you transfer using something like a peristaltic pump (or some other method)?

Thanks in advance for any advice. I am, of course, open to knowing any other relevant SOPs about which is didn't occur to me to ask!

Cheers,

Paul Philippon
The Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery
Farmville NC
paul@duckrabbitbrewery.com

We do exactly what you're talking about Paul. We have a 20 bbl yeast brink on load cells. We harvest certain brands on certain days of fermentation based on experiments. The brink is tared before the harvest and then filled up. Our agitator is on a VFD just like all our brewery pumps, and you can program VFDs now. Our old agitation timer cost us $10k, but at our new facility, I simply looked up how to program the VFD. There is a "pump rinse" feature that is activated in sleep mode. Whenever we aren't agitating at a set value, which we have for harvest, pitch, and cell counts, the brink is in Sleep Mode. You can program your VFD to go into sleep mode at a certain Hz, I have ours at 0.1 Hz. After harvest, pitch, or cell count, we simply lower the Hz to 0.1, the VFD enters sleep mode and in sleep mode it activated the "pump rinse" feature. This feature is really supposed to push a little water through the pump when it's idol, but we can use it to our advantage in the agitator set up. The rinse feature has a set amount of time it runs then it sleeps. Perfect for keeping the brink homogenous! So I have it agitate at 10 Hz for 2 min then sleep for 6. I'm still working on the timing, since agitation does affect yeast health. Let me know if you have any questions about this.

So for cell counts, it's really a two part process: 1. Find out the volume:weight ratio (sometimes it's like chunky peanut butter and sometimes it's a more beery slurry. It's really based on when we take it off and those are set values from flavor profiles and yeast health experiments). 2. Count and Viability with Methylene Violet (much better than Blue and White Labs has it in stock). I sani it, and grab two yeast samples in 50 mL conical tubes that have been weighed out empty before I grabbed the sample (usually their the same weight but every now and again they aren't). I then weigh the tube with yeast in there, so now I know the yeast weight. I then dilute the slurry with water to 50 mL. I take 50mL and subtract the amount of water I used. This is now the yeast volume. I do volume this way because most of the time the yeast has CO2 coming out of solution and it's super viscous and clings to the walls, so you can't get a good volume reading without diluting it down a little first. I then do my regular 1:50 dilution with water, but it's already been diluted a little, so I need to figure out how much further to dilute it. It's a simple calculation. Then I mix it up, and take a sample of the 1:50 diluted slurry and add it to the same volume of Methylene Violet. That dilution was 1:2, and with the 1:50 previously, we are now at 1:100 or the perfect slurry dilution for calculating. I do my regular hemacytometer count and now I can relate that cell/ml to cells/lb with my volume:weight ratio.

As for pitching and harvesting, we push with CO2 pressure to pitch into the wort way. We also harvest with pressure in the yeast brink. We have massive 255bbl fermenters that are 30 ft tall, so the hydrostatic pressure at the bottom of the tank is huge, so if the yeast went into the yeast brink and didn't have any pressure in there, they'd explode from a sudden change in deltaP.

Let me know if you have any questions! I love my yeast brink!

[Paul Philippon]

Perfect!

We do exactly what you're talking about Paul. We have a 20 bbl yeast brink on load cells. We harvest certain brands on certain days of fermentation based on experiments. The brink is tared before the harvest and then filled up. Our agitator is on a VFD just like all our brewery pumps, and you can program VFDs now. Our old agitation timer cost us $10k, but at our new facility, I simply looked up how to program the VFD. There is a "pump rinse" feature that is activated in sleep mode. Whenever we aren't agitating at a set value, which we have for harvest, pitch, and cell counts, the brink is in Sleep Mode. You can program your VFD to go into sleep mode at a certain Hz, I have ours at 0.1 Hz. After harvest, pitch, or cell count, we simply lower the Hz to 0.1, the VFD enters sleep mode and in sleep mode it activated the "pump rinse" feature. This feature is really supposed to push a little water through the pump when it's idol, but we can use it to our advantage in the agitator set up. The rinse feature has a set amount of time it runs then it sleeps. Perfect for keeping the brink homogenous! So I have it agitate at 10 Hz for 2 min then sleep for 6. I'm still working on the timing, since agitation does affect yeast health. Let me know if you have any questions about this.

So for cell counts, it's really a two part process: 1. Find out the volume:weight ratio (sometimes it's like chunky peanut butter and sometimes it's a more beery slurry. It's really based on when we take it off and those are set values from flavor profiles and yeast health experiments). 2. Count and Viability with Methylene Violet (much better than Blue and White Labs has it in stock). I sani it, and grab two yeast samples in 50 mL conical tubes that have been weighed out empty before I grabbed the sample (usually their the same weight but every now and again they aren't). I then weigh the tube with yeast in there, so now I know the yeast weight. I then dilute the slurry with water to 50 mL. I take 50mL and subtract the amount of water I used. This is now the yeast volume. I do volume this way because most of the time the yeast has CO2 coming out of solution and it's super viscous and clings to the walls, so you can't get a good volume reading without diluting it down a little first. I then do my regular 1:50 dilution with water, but it's already been diluted a little, so I need to figure out how much further to dilute it. It's a simple calculation. Then I mix it up, and take a sample of the 1:50 diluted slurry and add it to the same volume of Methylene Violet. That dilution was 1:2, and with the 1:50 previously, we are now at 1:100 or the perfect slurry dilution for calculating. I do my regular hemacytometer count and now I can relate that cell/ml to cells/lb with my volume:weight ratio.

As for pitching and harvesting, we push with CO2 pressure to pitch into the wort way. We also harvest with pressure in the yeast brink. We have massive 255bbl fermenters that are 30 ft tall, so the hydrostatic pressure at the bottom of the tank is huge, so if the yeast went into the yeast brink and didn't have any pressure in there, they'd explode from a sudden change in deltaP.

Let me know if you have any questions! I love my yeast brink!

Peter,

That's perfect! I really appreciate the detail. We do have a programmable VFD on our mixer, so setting the timing should be easy. Also, I've used methylene violet before as well (as ever since reading an ASBC paper about it in '98 or '99). I like it, but not everyone does.

Cheers,

Paul Philippon
The Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery
Farmville NC
paul@duckrabbitbrewery.com

[Yeast]

this is a great way to inject from the brink. I think you can see how it works