• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Advertise
  • About Craft Brewing Business

Craft Brewing Business

Professional Insight, Unfiltered

Craft Brewing Business Craft Brewing Business
  • News
  • Business & Marketing
  • Packaging & Distribution
  • Equipment & Systems
  • Ingredients & Supplies
  • Webinars & White Papers
  • News
  • Business & Marketing
  • Ingredients & Supplies
  • Packaging & Distribution
  • Equipment
  • Webinars & White Papers
  • COVID-19

Watch: White Labs teaches craft brewers how to count yeast cells

June 26, 2019Keith Gribbins

Brewing consistent, quality craft beer requires viable yeast. Beer scientists need to understand the amount of live and dead yeast cells when pitching specific beers.

There are many ways to do this. There are cool machines like the NucleoCounter YC-100, which determines the number of yeast cells and the percentage of living cells (the viability), providing precision and reliability for beer makers. There’s the Aber Countstar. It’s the first slide-based image analysis instrument for yeast cell counts that uses the same safe, traditional stains used in microscopy. And then there’s the traditional conical tubes, stain, hemocytometer and microscope method, which is detailed in the video above.

White Labs is world-renowned yeast expert and fermenting consultant, and it understands the importance of viability. The famed San Diego-headquartered company offers lots of educational opportunities: laboratory staff training, contamination risk assessment, yeast handling, laboratory setup, yeast propagation and cellar training. The company’s website is also full of excellent info. For instance, in the video above, Technical Laboratory Manager Kara Taylor explains how to perform yeast cell counting and viability testing.

What brewers need:

  • 15-ml conical tubes
  • Citrate Methylene blue stain or Alkaline Methylene violet, 0.01 percent concentration
  • Hemocytometer
  • Kimwipes or other line free wipe cloth
  • Hand-held counter
  • Microscope
  • Transfer pipettes or other types of pipette materials

To start, dilute a yeast slurry. If you don’t know how to do that, watch this video below.

If you’re counting yeast in a fermenter sample or a beer sample, use the sample as is.

Using the transfer pipette, allocate 1 millimeter (mL) of diluted yeast slurry into the conical tube, then 1 mL of stain into the same tube. Then pipette approximately 10 microliters (µl) of that solution onto the center of one of the counting areas on the hemocytometer.

Carefully place that hemocytometer onto the microscope stage, starting at 100x view to center the counting grid. The cells should be spread evenly across the grid without air bubbles.

To learn the rest, watch the videos above and/or jump over to White Lab’s comprehensive web page dedicated to yeast counting.

White Labs’ Aseptic Transfer System is a safe, clean and efficient in-line, closed yeast transfer solution
White Labs launches PurePitch Next Generation as ‘the easiest way to pitch the most verifiably superior yeast on the planet’
Watch: Start off the week learning about five important beer glass styles
GEA-Hilge-NOVATWIN-Foto-1
GEA’s Hilge NOVATWIN completes its line of hygienic screw pumps

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Melissa Luelling says

    June 26, 2019 at 2:38 pm

    Aaron Luelling

    Log in to Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Primary Sidebar

Latest News

  • Anderson Valley Brewing promotes price stability amid Big Beer price hikes: ‘We actually like our customers’
  • Ohio how has 400 craft breweries! Here are some other Buckeye beer stats to know
  • IBA hits milestone – 1 million bbls of buying power – what’s next for the co-op?
  • Plastic can carrier recycling co-op debuts in Chicago

Sign up for our newsletter

unsubscribe from list

Most Popular Today

Recent Features

  • The-IBA-TeamIBA hits milestone – 1 million bbls of buying power – what’s next for the co-op?
    May 19, 2022
  • 2022 beer branding trends part 1: reinvention
    May 17, 2022
  • satisfaction surveysAre brewery employees happy? Depends on the department
    May 16, 2022
  • Male hand closes hatch of brewery tankUnfiltered: Do I need to clean tanks between transfers?
    May 11, 2022
  • Hard seltzers: Achieve high alcohol fermentations in a clean and neutral way with the proper nutrient aids
    May 9, 2022
  • Paxton Products uses air and ionization to rinse and dry beer bottles and cans
    May 9, 2022

Footer

  • Email Newsletter Sign Up
  • About Craft Brewing Business
  • Contact Us
  • Advertise on Craft Brewing Business
  • Media Kit Download
  • Privacy and Terms

© 2022 · CBB Media LLC

Posting....