Stock-n-Store: Cryogenic Vials for Culture Stocking and Storage

"Extend" your cultures for reliable, quality future batches.

Take store-bought cultured product (or your own), add equal parts to the cryogenic vial (0.5ml/500ul) and freeze. Remove and add to your fermentation - cultures 1 gallon or more (depending on your culture and fermentation temperature/time).

Extend your fermentations by the gallons by stocking your own starters - AND SAVE!

Yogurt example... at a typical 5.3 oz. yogurt cup found in stores, each of your stocked vials would culture 1 gallon (maybe more) of milk, giving you between 20 and 24 cups of yogurt. (assuming a live and active culture at time of storage)... that's $0.17-$0.20 per cup at our lowest purchase offering! (after initial make and cost of milk, of course)

Food-grade formulation inhibits ice crystal formation during freezing, extending your culture's viability and making possible long-term storage down to extremely low temperatures (<-80C). 

Make one batch of your favorite fermentation, portion off with our Store-n-Stock kits, freeze to store.

Each kit contains:

• "X" number of cryovials* (containing 500uL FG glycerol solution**)
• Sterile swabs
• Sterile plastic pipets
• Foam storage rack

* 2ml vials - sterile, stand-able, o-ringed, write-able area for labeling, and graduated for easy measuring

** Food-grade (FG) glycerol solution - 50% FG glycerol/phosphate-buffered saline (PBS); does not allow ice crystal formation and allows long-term frozen storage limiting die-off 

How it works:

• remove cap from cryovial and on counter top or in foam rack
• open and remove sterile swab
• use swab to add your fermentation to the cryovial to the 1ml mark (now is 50/50)
• stir, cap, shake
• store in freezer; the colder, the better (can even store below -80C if available)

It isn't as tricky as most want you to believe. Yes, cultures/starters degrade over time from "passage" to "passage" - from "use" to "use" - from freeze-thaw to freeze-thaw... you get the idea. And you know it - BUT! You also know there must be another way. Another way to keep your cultures, extend them, it just makes sense. Well, yes, you're right - there is. But it does take some attention. It isn't a toss-off-easy-thing... but it isn't hard either. 

The basics of creating a stock storage of your favorite culture, whether taken from direct-set from "pure" cultures or protecting our heirloom, is straight-forward and simple. But you don't know what you don't know until you know, you know?

But maybe you do know... but you don't have the things needed. Like sterile tools or the proper solution at the correct osmotic/pH/buffer to make sure your culture cells won't die from all-of-the-things... the easiest to envision is when we freeze something - ice crystals form and they can shear and kill live cells. There's a way to prevent this.

Our sterile, ready-made kit allows you to add your fermentation culture at an equal volume to the volume in the provided sterile cryovial and it will be at the proper condition for log-term storage... down to -80degC!