Yeast & Bacteria
For my most recent batch of homebrew, my Marris Otter and Apollo SMaSH - “MOpollo”, I harvested yeast from my last fermentation of Melissa’s Amber. Since Melissa’s Amber was such a low gravity beer, and the S-04 I used flocculated into such a nice cake, it was easy to harvest a mason jar full of almost pure unstressed yeast slurry. I made a small starter with it the day I brewed the smash and pitched a healthy cell count. The smash I made was a little higher gravity so the ability to over-pitch by basically using a 3.5 gallon starter was nice, not to mention the fact that I didn’t have to buy more yeast.
On another note, I also grew up a kombucha culture from a couple bottles of unfiltered kombucha. The culture definitely contains some ale yeast, but most important contains some acetobacter that can really produce a ton of acetic acid (vinegar) if you let the fermentation continue for a while. I’m starting a lemongrass and honey kombucha using this culture soon.
