Repitching Yeast

[Sanchex]

I've got a stout in my primary fermenter which I will be racking to secondary in a week and want to repitch a porter onto the yeast cake but am concerned about the excessive amount of trub in the carboy. Should I wash the yeast or at very least filter out some of the trub before repitching?

[Derek]

A lot of people don't do a secondary... so it's on the trub the whole time.

That said, I have washed it when I had a lot of trub. I basically just dumped the cake into a smaller diameter container the day before brewing... let it sediment out, removed the crap, added some sterile water & mixed it up, let it sediment, then try to scrape out the healthy looking yeast.

I never tried filtering...

[grub]

i never do, but i also generally only reuse cakes once, and for a bigger beer the second time than the first. transfer one out and the next in, that's it.

note that generally these go from lighter -> darker, less hoppy -> more hoppy, smaller -> bigger so the first beer is less likely to have any influence on the second (aside from providing a ton of happy yeasties).

[Sanchex]

thanks for the great advice. i think i'll take the easy route and see what happens. i'll just make sure to brew a little extra so i don't risk adding much more solids to the carboy.