Yeast storage in distilled water
March 2, 2009 – 10:43 amI’ve been culturing yeast on plates/slants for a while now and thought it would be fun to try the distilled water storage method. There are a bunch of resources online that I found info from so I don’t need to rehash it here.
http://www.mousetrap.net/mouse/brewing/dwyeast.html
http://brewery.org/brewery/library/SterileDW1096.html
Right now I just have some Bells Two Hearted yeast and some WLP410 in this form, but I’ll eventually get more and more of my yeast in this form so I don’t have to keep culturing on slants. I made a few extra tubes of the Bells yeast that I’ll use to check viability over time. In a few weeks I’ll try to plate out some just to see.
I’ll probably keep strains that are tough to get on slants for a while until I’m sure that this is working out for me, but other strains that I can get easily I’ll probably stop putting on slants.
Update: I was too excited to leave it alone so a few days ago I dipped my loop into one of the tubes and streaked it out on a plate. Two days later I was happy to see growth. Sounds like this is going to be a handy technique.
2 Responses to “Yeast storage in distilled water”
I’d be very interested in trying the distilled water suspension technique myself, although I enjoy slanting.
By Jason Konopinski on Mar 13, 2009
So far I’ve only plated out from one culture and it was as expected. I really hope it works well since I have a bunch of strains that I don’t use very often, but I would like to keep them around for the future.
By james on Mar 13, 2009