In a retrospective fashion, two different blood culture bottles with biphasic brain heat infusion media, one permanently and the other transiently vented, were compared to a transiently vented tryptic soy broth blood culture bottle for the recovery of yeasts from blood. A total of 95 isolates of Candida species and 19 isolates of Cryptococcus neoformans were recovered, of which 95% were from the permanently vented biphasic medium bottle incubated at 30 degrees C, 57% were from the transiently vented biphasic medium bottle incubated at 35 degrees C, and 45% were from the transiently vented tryptic soy broth bottle incubated at 35 degrees C. In 81% of the patients with candidemia, yeasts were detected either only (50%) or earlier (31%) in the permanently vented biphasic blood culture bottle. The mean recovery time was shorter in both biphasic media compared to the tryptic soy broth bottle. Cryptococcus neoformans was not recovered from the transiently vented broth, and less than 50% of the isolates of Candida glabrata and Cryptococcus neoformans grew in the transiently vented biphasic bottle. The results suggest that when fungemia is suspected, the use of a permanently vented biphasic bottle incubated at 30 degrees C will increase the recovery rate of yeasts from blood and that the transiently vented biphasic bottle and tryptic soy broth bottle are less satisfactory for this purpose.