ok, i hate asking these kinds of questions… but i need to.
I’m planning out my brews for the next 6 months, and I’m planning on two 9-11% ABV beers with attenuation hopefully between 75% to 85%
last year was not a wonderful year for my brewing and i don’t want to mess up the higher ABV ones again.
I had great success with simply using multiple packets of Bry97, got 85% attenuation with about 8% sucrose in the boil.
i will spare you the whole story, but:
do you guys use yeast cakes for high OG beers and find them to be reliable? I’m saying half of the whole yeast cake for 20 litres of ~1.085 - 1.100 OG beers?
I always use a yeast cake from a previous 1.050 beer. I make a Barleywine each year and also an Imperial Stout or Belgian Dark Strong. Sometimes I place the yeast in plastic containers or I simply just siphon directly on top of the yeast if I transfer the original beer the same day. This method has worked well for me with very little lag time and a overall quick and healthy fermentation. Both ways work. This is just the way I prefer because I get consistent results.
I almost always plan my beers intending to use yeast slurry from the cake. You probably don’t want to use the whole cake since you will be carrying a lot of dead cells over. You probably will also want some yeast growth ad pitching an entire cake will be over pitching almost no matter how high your gravity it. I basically use a 1/8-1/4 of the cake for any beer under 1.065 and about 1/4-1/2 for any beer over 1.065. It’s not super scientific but it gets me where I want to go. Plus, it’s just hard to measure out.
That said, certainly nothing wrong with using multiple packs of dry yeast.Just ends up being more expensive. I can brew many, many batches off one package of yeast if planned right
Slurry is the best way to go, especially if you’ve harvested it within a few days. There’s nothing wrong with doing a dry yeast starter either. I’ve been doing it for several years with great results.
I also aerate on the second day with a mix stir and use some yeast nutrient for big beers, which I don’t normally do for small beers. I usually do a few days of open fermentation, ie., bucket lid on loose.
I pump to the fermenter and let it splash in, but that’s it. My theory is that aeration is for cell growth, and the more healthy cells you pitch the less need for growth.
But it still breaks my heart to toss a functional yeast population after going through all the trouble to help create one.
I’m racking into bottles tomorrow so perhaps this might be a good time to experiment with transferring a cake between batches. Wonder how long I can keep it going?
if you want to save the yeast for later, i have frequently put the cake into 500ml bottles and bottled them. cant remember the longest i left it before trying to use it but i’d say at least 2 months.
We use harvested yeast 90% of the time…Diamond Lager is the one most often used.
Brewing every two weeks keeps the yeast viable and healthy.
We have a couple examples of harvested yeast that are several months old. Might dump them.
As stated, we always over-pitch, even more so on a high ABV beer.
Can’t remember the last time I actually opened up a package of dry yeast…
be careful promoting over-pitching, sacch might hear you.
so i’m still going with multiple sachets of dry yeast for very big beers (over 1.08) while am using harvested liquid for brews up to 1.07. there was an issue i believe with the particular grist i used last year, and that i didn’t oxygenate it sufficiently. but i was traumatized by a low-hopped beer that ended at 1.032 or so last winter. it was a dumper. now im paranoid about attenuation
Denny is on the money. I have resurrected crops that were a year old (brewing yeast cultures are lot tougher than we think). I recently switched over to using 500ml Corning 1396-500 square media bottles to store my crops. I previously used 500ml Erlenmeyer flasks for crops, which are a much more cost effective piece of labware. I just grew tired of the stoppers and airlocks popping out or using aluminum foil to cap a flask. I like using square media bottle when they get to be this size because they waste less shelf space in my dedicated brewing refrigerator.
some are. after googling a fair bit, ive decided im not going to be using WLP023 as i had planned, as multiple separate people complained that it basically died on them due to having a production date just a few months old. they all couldnt effectively get it to make a starter doing normal processes.
there are variations between the different yeast in terms of vigour and other factors that arent well detailed yet.
i would love to have suggested O2 requirement categories for yeast or even simply just a note like “this one needs heavy oxygenation”.