Plastic Yeast Storage Vials 15ml Qty 5

Description

Plastic Yeast Storage Vials 15ml are the small format vial for home brewers who want a proper strain library without giving up half the fridge. Each tube is translucent polypropylene with a graduated scale up the side, a frosted write on panel for the strain name and harvest date, and a blue screw cap that seals tight and doubles as a stand, so the round bottomed tube sits upright on its lid. Sanitise, fill with washed yeast or a sample off a healthy starter, label it, and refrigerate. When you want that strain again you step the vial up into a starter and pitch. Sold in packs of five. In stock at Yeast Platform, shipped from our Australian warehouse.

Why 15ml Instead of 50ml

A 15ml vial is a seed vial, not a pitch. That is the point. A few millilitres of thick, healthy slurry holds more than enough cells to build a starter, and at that size you can keep eight or ten different strains in the space one 50ml vial would take. If you want to store a full pitch of slurry and drop it straight into the next batch, use the 50ml vials. If you want a library you can actually maintain, keep the strains in 15ml vials and grow one up whenever you brew.

Banking Yeast in 15ml Vials

The method is the same one brewers have used for decades, just scaled down. After you package a batch, add a little cooled boiled water to the yeast cake, swirl, and let it settle for around twenty minutes in a sanitised jar. Trub and dead cells drop out first, the healthy yeast stays in suspension, so decant the cloudy layer off the top and fill your vials from that. Leave a couple of millilitres of headspace, cap firmly, write the strain and the date on the panel, and stand them in the fridge. Washed yeast held at 2 to 4°C stays usefully viable for two to three months, and you can keep a strain going well past that by stepping a vial up and re banking fresh samples from the new starter.

Stepping a Vial Up to a Pitch

Because a 15ml vial holds a seed rather than a pitch, plan on a starter. Pull the vial out an hour or two before you use it so it comes up to room temperature, pitch the whole thing into around 500ml of 1.040 wort, and give it 24 to 36 hours on a stir plate or with regular swirling. From there, either pitch that starter into a small batch or step it into a larger volume for a full 23L pitch. Older or slower samples appreciate a hand, so add yeast nutrient to the starter wort to bring the cell count back up before brew day.

Other Uses on Brew Day

Brewers rarely stop at yeast with these. The graduated scale and the sealing cap make them handy for pre measuring salt and finings additions for a brew day, splitting a liquid yeast pack across several small batches, keeping glycerol stocks in the freezer for long term strain storage, and holding samples for gravity or pH checks. They are cheap enough to treat as consumables, and small enough that a pack of five lives in the brewing box rather than taking up bench space.

In stock at Yeast Platform and shipped from our Australian warehouse. Sanitise with a no rinse sanitiser such as Star San before filling. These are polypropylene tubes, so do not boil them.