I plan to brew a barley wine and barrel age it. It will take three brew sessions in order to get enough beer in order to fill the 15 gallon barrel. In the past I have built a good size starter, divide that starter into 3 jars, and prop up one of the jars on the day before brewing. This has worked fine for me and I was wondering if my planned change in procedure will head me down the path of trouble.
I plan to brew each subsequent batch after fermentation is finished with the previous batch.
I will be using a healthy pitch of Omega OYL 005 Irish ale yeast for my initial pitch. I plan on putting the new wort on the yeast cake immediately after racking off the beer.
The beer should finish around 10% ABV, so I was wondering if the yeast will be too stressed and produce off flavors on batch 2 and 3
Has anyone had any luck reusing a yeast cake to ferment a big beer after a previous big beer?
There are more expert yeast wranglers than me on this board, but I feel like that’d be a massive overpitch. I think you could dump most of the lees and just pitch onto a liter or so of slurry.
That will work fine. I make a Barleywine every year and I have used the entire yeast cake from a 1.050 beer for a 10-11% Barleywine. Make sure to use a blow off tube.
I’ve not tried this, but I (personally) would worry about off-flavors from stressed yeast in such a scenario…and by the third batch, would autolysis be an additional major potential issue? I can only imagine that it’s a ridiculous amount of dead yeast on the bottom by that point. So, it’s less the repitch and more the repitch of a high gravity beer onto a high gravity beer yeast cake. I think the suggestion of only pitching onto a liter of slurry is best…but again, the yeast ain’t going to be at their best and brightest from this kind of fermentation.
If it were my beer, I would do a fresh pitch each time.
I would also worry about the yeast being stressed in the second and third batches. That might be something worth experimenting with in smaller batches but I’d hate to attempt that exercise on 15 gallons.
Sorry, I missed the part of using a yeast cake from a previous big beer. There could be a problem, but most likely not. I don’t save yeast from high gravity beers because like others stated the yeast could be stressed from all their work.
I wouldn’t do that, based both on science and personal experience.
i make big beers, but ive always done:
-use the yeast from a modest ABV beer (~5%)
or
-use 2 or 3 dry yeast sachets
a thought re: OYL005 - you could get another packet of OYL005, AND take a sample of that high gravity leftover yeast and make a quick SNS starter from it - basically making a double strength OYL005 starter for the price of a single pack of it?
i used to mix the dry yeast sachets together like 1 BRY97 with 1 BE256 or whatever, but i think i got mixed results that way as one of them is inherently going to start fermenting faster than the other.
You won’t be making a double strength starter unless you double the wort. And I don’t see the point in using the used yeast along with new. You’d still be at least partially using unhealthy yeast.
I think that your original method as stated in the first paragraph is a good way to go but you could also make a session strength beer first, essentially using it as a large starter, then harvest three containers of slurry from there and make a starter from one of those for each brew.
I have gone the session beer re-pitch route without any problem, but I would be concerned with yeast re-use from the first big beer finished fermentation yeast cake - just concerned about allowing for sufficient yeast growth as well as possible formation of petite mutants (stressed yeast issue). With a project that involves so much malt, I would err on the side of caution.
Yea, I wouldn’t repitch from the high gravity brew. I was suggesting dividing the slurry from the session in three then pitching each third into each new high gravity brew.