Yeast harvesting from canned Belgians

General Homebrew Discussion
1

Has anybody tried harvesting yeast from Dupont, Delirium, or St. Bernardus since they started canning?

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2

Nope, but I’d be surprised if you couldn’t. But I’ve been wrong before.

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3

I wondered this re: unibroue since I have decent access to them and they do all cans now.

4

If there is sediment in the can then it is probably viable. Give it a shot.

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5

i havent seen any of those belgians canned here yet. but unibroue is now canned and many of the big german weisse beers are canned ie. schneider, hacker-pschorr, paulaner

would love it if someone bit the bullet and tried to harvest > then step up > then do some kind of larger test ie 10 litres or so just so we can know if it smells on target.

im risk averse and dont have a press it and forget it setup, so im unwilling to spend an active brew day to test this. does anyone know a good test? its just i feel like i can never tell smelling from a distance trying not to infect a little 1 litre starter.

i’m thinking just for testing purposes - something like this:

250ml of 1.040 DME wort and as much dregs as you can add. SNS.
24 hours
add this to 1 litre of DME wort at 1.040. SNS
24 hours
add this to 4 litres of wort made from DME (1lb DME in 4litres end result wort for about 1.037OG)
give it actual time and cold-crash it.

you could probably get a good handle on if the yeast is in fact what its supposed to be without excessive cost, though this would take about 2 weeks.

point for all this work is that here in canada we still have limited access to many liquid yeasts. the formerly very well stocked but VERY pricy torontobrewing.ca now has a highly limited wyeast selection - looks like theyre phasing it out, and nu-whitelabs for $23.99 a pack. lol, lmao even. and since everything else they have is so much pricier than my main OHBS, i’d theoretically be getting that rare yeast and then throwing ~$25 shipping on it. so im looking at ~$50 for a single yeast type.

6

Good grief. And I thought prices down here were bad…

7

Too much wort and too strong. Try 50-100 ml of 1.020 for a first step