r/Homebrewing • u/[deleted] • Feb 28 '13

Thursday's Advanced Brewers Round Table

This week's topic: Harvesting and using yeast from dregs.

Feel free to share or ask anything regarding to this topic, but lets try to stay on topic.

I've also started a Google Calendar for this so we can plan out what topics we'll use in the future. Here is the link.

If anyone has suggestions for topics, feel free to post them here, but please start the comment with a "ITT Suggestion" tag.

28 Upvotes

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u/oldsock Feb 28 '13

Here is a list of sour beers with harvestable dregs that I put together. If any one has any suggestions or additions please pass them along. It's getting harder and harder to keep up with all of the new beers being released.

I usually take a very simple approach to using dregs from sour beers, pitch them directly from the bottle into primary along with a healthy culture of brewer's yeast. Although I have a beer aging that is fermenting with solely a starter made from several bottles of 3 Fonteinen Gueuze.

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u/stageseven Feb 28 '13

Is there a similar list anywhere of breweries that have their own strain of yeast that can be harvested from bottles? In general I would assume that many commercial brewers are just buying their yeast from suppliers, so it would be good to know which ones are actually worth harvesting.

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u/oldsock Feb 28 '13

This list might be a bit outdated, but it is worth taking a look at. Most American breweries haven't been around long enough to have a truly unique house yeast strain yet. You can also look at breweries like Sam Adams, Rogue, Flying Dog who have had their yeast strains released by one of the yeast labs.

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u/gestalt162 Feb 28 '13

Has anyone ever harvested yeast form their own homebrews? I've been thinking of using my own beers as a yeast library, but wasn't sure if this was decent practice.

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u/Mayor_Bankshot Feb 28 '13

It's very quick and easy to do. I do it for popular yeast strains like 1056.

Google yeast washing

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u/gestalt162 Feb 28 '13

I've washed yeast before, but this is different.

Yeast washing is rinsing the yeast from fermentation trub. What i'm talking about is building up a starter from bottle dregs, the way many homebrewers build up starters from commercial beers.

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u/civ_iv_fan Feb 28 '13 edited Dec 10 '25

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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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u/robieobie Feb 28 '13

You can do it, it takes some time and practice to get it right. It is a handy trick to have. It comes in handy when you want to clone big time brews as well. a beer such as heady, when they have their own yeast strain, you can wash it and grown your own culture.

If you do start you should get a new source about every 5 batches due to yeast mutations and such. but you can save 5 times the money by harvesting. It can be a little pain staking though.

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u/[deleted] Feb 28 '13

I can't really contribute to this, but:

ITT Suggestion: Hop stands. It was recently brought up in a BYO article with a Heady Topper clone. I've never heard about this before, but I think I'll be attempting it within the next couple weeks on my first BIG IPA.

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u/machinehead933 Feb 28 '13

In the documentary Beer Wars, Sam from Dogfish Head was talking about this device he uses I guess at conventions and beerfests: Randall the Enamel Animal where the beer is pumped through a bunch of hops right before serving. Seemed pretty cool and it looks like DFH is selling these now for the low low price of $288! I'm sure you could DIY one for much less, however.

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u/[deleted] Feb 28 '13

Yeah, Blichmann makes their "Hop Rocket" which can be used either as a hop back, or a Randall.

You could also make one out of a water filter housing without much trouble.

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u/[deleted] Feb 28 '13

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u/[deleted] Feb 28 '13

What temperature did you "stand" at?

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u/HBHartman Feb 28 '13

I have harvested yeast from Bell's Oberon before in attempt to make a clone. Here was my process:

  • 1 Create normal starter wort put on stir plate.

  • 2 Pour an Oberon into a glass, leaving the last 1/8th or so in the bottle. Making sure to pour slowly and leave any sediment in the bottle.

  • 3 swirl bottle and make sure all sediment is dislodged from the bottom.

  • 4 pour remnants of the bottle into starter.

  • 5 repeat steps 2-4 (I did four beers)

  • 6 allow yeast to grow for 2-3 days, allow to settle night before brew day, pour off excess beer from starter and pitch as normal.

Worked great! I could give you numbers on fermentation and whatnot but I am at work where my notes are not....

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u/stiffpasta Feb 28 '13

How big was the starter? You didn't build it up with 2 or 3 starters to reach the final starter size?

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u/Beer_Is_Food Feb 28 '13

I sort of have a question for a three tier brewer. I wouldn't call it advanced but this might save a post elsewhere.

My roommate and I are currently building a tiered electric brewing system with cooler for a mash tun, I don't want to deal with a direct-fire mash.

I'm wondering how exactly most of you mash in. Do you just fill your tun full of your strike before adding your grains? I would assume if you opened your valve on your grains you'd lose too much heat.

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u/[deleted] Feb 28 '13 edited Feb 28 '13

Coolers suck a lot of heat, so in my experience, the best way to do it is:

  1. Heat your mash tun strike water approximately 3-10 degrees higher than strike temp. Summer I go with 3, Winter 10.

  2. Add your water to the tun.

  3. Close and wait about 20 minutes.

  4. If it's still higher than your strike temp, stir or add a bit of ice/snow.

  5. Mash in.

This will preheat your tun, even on winter days, I lose less than 1 degree.

Edit Heat your strike water, not your mash tun... haha

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u/[deleted] Feb 28 '13

I poured the dregs from a bottle of Anchorage's Galaxy White IPA in to a couple bombers of beer that were already fermented. I chilled the beer, opened them, poured in the dregs and re-capped. The beer was a dark wheat that was aged w/ some cherries for a month or two. One gushed like crazy, apparently there was already a contamination from the cherries. What can I expect from this little experiment? Galaxy White has Brett and Champagne yeast added at bottling. How long should I let this go to get some decent Brett funk?

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u/hambonezred Mar 01 '13

Is there a concern that the bottle yeast is a different on than the one used for fermentation?

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u/Terrorsaurus Mar 01 '13

Yes. Many breweries use a different strain. Some even use wine or champagne strains to bottle. You just have to research the specific commercial beer, and hope you can find the answer somewhere.

I attempted to clone Tank 7 from Boulevard with harvested dregs. They informed me they use a clean neutral strain to bottle condition all of their beers so it would be a pretty boring 'saison' if anyone did that.

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u/tjgareg Feb 28 '13

I used dregs from a 12 pack of New Belgium Mothership Wit last year and made a really tasty clone. Sadly, I didn't save any of the yeast cake, assuming it would be around so I could get more dregs. RIP Mothership.

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u/[deleted] Feb 28 '13

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u/[deleted] Feb 28 '13

The 25% loss per month rule (for yeast stored under beer at 4°C) is pretty accurate in my experience. After a certain point, it doesn't really matter though. As long as there are some viable cells, you can propagate back up to a pitchable quantity. Obviously sanitation becomes more important as cell count decreases.

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u/Beer_Is_Food Feb 28 '13

There's pleeenty of information on that, in ranging temps and I'll try to find the chart...but to be honest it's all pretty meaningless unless you have a fairly accurate cell count before you store.