I’ve enjoyed a few bottle conditioned beers recently and was wondering if it’s possible to cultivate the left over yeast. Is the yeast still viable after being conditioned in the bottle? How much leftover yeast would I need for a successful starter, if possible? I also wonder if the creation of CO2 by the yeast is enough to kill any existing yeast in the bottle.
You can absolutely do this and its not hard. All you need is good sanitation. Have you tried searching this forum? I got some good advice on the details of this process about a year ago.
Harvesting yeast bottle
The last post is what I tried to search based on the title of the thread. I typed that in the search area of tapatalk and it posted as a reply and I can’t edit with tapatalk because its evil.
This is pretty easy to do. Just make a very small starter 50-100ml and pour it in to the bottle after you have carefully poured out the beer and saved the yeast on the bottom. The biggest caveat is that many bottle conditioned beers use a different yeast at bottling for the carbonation, so you can’t be sure that the yeast you are growing up are the same yeast that were used to create the beer in the first place.
This is all true. There is a list on-line somewhere that someone put together of which beers use a bottling yeast and which don’t. Not sure it’s 100% accurate, but for example Franziskaner bottles with a lager yeast. You can culture it, but you won’t get a wheat yeast.
Also, start with very low OG wort, be patient, and plan to step up several times.
If you’re trying to culture from a bottle, I’d encourage you to leave a bit of the beer behind as well. Any cells that are still in suspension are likely to be much more viable than the ones that have already dropped out.
You also want to use a lower-strength starter for your first step to put less stress on the yeast. I’ve strted using 2oz of normal-strength starter to 2oz of beer, which will dilute to a half-strength starter. The beer also acts as a bit of protection for the yeast, as the lower pH and alcohol content will inhibit some potential contaminants.
I pour the beer into the starter in a mason jar, then shake it until it’s pretty much all foam to oxygenate it well. I usually let it go for 5-7 days before stepping it up to a normal-sized starter.
Its my understanding that the current wisdom is that very few breweries use different yeast for bottle conditioning these days.
I know for sure that Victory uses a bottling yeast. At least for Golden Monkey. Same with Franziskaner.
There are a couple others I can’t think of off the top of my head.
But, there are probably many many more that don’t bother.
I think I would only do sour beer bottle dregs. They would be much more lively than sacc dregs, and it just doesn’t seem that necessary with all the available sacc strains.
This is a good point but its fun to do and in my opinion something a home brewer might do just because they can.
With Belgian beers you have to know which beers have been pasteurized and have bottling yeast, and which ones have the original yeast. For sacch, for instance, the trappist beers have the original yeast, and beers like Duvel and Rodenbach have bottling yeast. Mike Tonsmeire’s book contains a list of sour beers that one can use.
No doubt.
Here’s the page that he keeps the updated list on: The Mad Fermentationist - Homebrewing Blog: List of Unpasteurized Sour and Funky Bottled Beers
Great stuff. Can’t wait to try harvesting my own samples.
Thanks
I am by no means a sour beer expert, but afaik it is not recommended to make a starter from the dregs of a mixed culture (i.e. from a beer made with sacch, brett, pedio, lacto, etc.) because the different critters do all not grow at the same rate. So the ratios in the starter will be different from the ratios in the original beer.
When I get around to doing this I will do my typical method of lacto till I get down below 4 ph then instead of brett I will enjoy all but the bottom 3-4" of two or three bottles of live commercial sours that I like, and just swirl them up and pitch as is. Maybe Commons Myrtle if I can score some.
While the ratios may change, I don’t think that makes a huge difference in the finished beer. If you don’t make a starter there may not be too much simple sugar available to the lacto by the time it has grown to a healthy cell count. You certainly don’t need to make a starter from dregs, but if you want to use them as your primary culture for a beer I think you’re better off having them healthy.
Plus, who’s to say that the ratio of viable bugs in the bottle is the same as those when the fermentation started? If you’re culturing from a gueuze you have critters that are 3+ years old and probably not in their best shape, if they survived.
Yup. Except that most dont start from scratch. Most repitch their blend. So you’re right, but what they pitched in that batch was also left over from the previous batch. Not like a laboratory melange that is sure to change after batch one. At some point the repitched commercial inoculation is what it is and pretty much stays what it is because its reached stability. A total least that sounds right in my head. Probably im wrong.