Bosh

Recipes 

Liquid yeast is insanely expensive here in Korea, so to save a little money would this have any chance of working to get some yeast for a Hoegaarten clone that SWMBO has commanded me to make:

1. Buy a bottle of Hoegaarten (has living yeast in it, right?).
2. Sit it out for a day or two to get warm, so the yeast wake up a bit.
3. Pour it into a two-liter bottle with some water and add some DME or sugar and wait for the yeast to get to work.

There's probably some reason why this wouldn't work, but I'm curious what it would be...

__________________
On deck: Oatmeal Stout
Primary: Bourbon Red Ale
Bottled: Dunkelweizen and Dunkel

McKBrew

Recipes 

It will work. I've found limited information, but here it is. Good Luck and share your technique if it works.

http://www.maltosefalcons.com/tech/bottleculturing.php

And from How to Brew, almost exactly the same technique

http://www.howtobrew.com/section1/chapter6-7.html

z987k

Recipes 

yeah I think you can do that with any unfiltered as long as their not pasteurized. I would think thats the best way to make a clone if thats what your going for.... use the actual yeast they use.

__________________
Beer Style Guidelines - Kaiser's Brewing Experiments - American Society of Brewing Chemists - Journal of the Institute of Brewing

Speranza

Recipes 

Hope it works for you. I've heard of some companies straining their yeast and introducing a different strain in the final product so you can't culture their yeast. Basically it might taste "different".

__________________
Tiny bubbles... In my beer... Makes me happy... Makes me want to cheer!

BarryNL

Recipes 

I'd start with a smaller starter than 2 litre and step up, the amount of yeast in a bottle is tiny. Begin with maybe a half litre starter, then up to a litre, then 2.

Unfortunately, a bit of Googling suggests that Hoegaarden is bottled with a different yeast strain than the fermenting yeast, so culturing it is unlikely to be useful.

I'd see what bottle conditioned wheat beers you can find and then Google to see what people think of the yeast.

Either that or look into freezing and splitting techniques so you can make a large number of batches from a single yeast purchase.

__________________
Brewing: Dunkelweizen '09, alt.beer.dusseldorf
Bottled: Erebus American IPA, Big 4-0 Barley Wine, Oranje Tripel, Got Milk Stout?
Planning: Oktoberfest, Peter the Grain RIS
Drinking: Abbey Daze, Best of 2008

Sir Humpsalot

Recipes 

If it's so expensive, why not buy a pressure cooker, some test tubes, and a bunsen burner and make your own slants? Seems you can DIY for pennies....


Somewhere here in HBT in the past month somebody posted a great link on how to grow slants. The cool thing is, you can buy one thing of yeast, save the tiniest amount for culturing, and pitch the rest into a beer. Then, you've got yeast for life.

__________________
In Process: Big Big Barley Wine, Hob Goblin Clone, Chocolate Porter, Light American Wheat
Bottled/Kegged: :-(
Up Next: Oatmeal Cookie Stout // Gumball head clone // ESB

ColoradoXJ13

Recipes 

Hoegaarden is bottle conditioned with the same yeast as it is fermented with. One of the local micros here uses that strain for their Wit. What you are doing should work fine, I would pour off most of the cold beer (yeast will settle better cold), then swirl the bottle to resuspend the yeast at the bottom, that way you can remove (i.e. drink) the beer, and get most of the yeast. From what I have read, most Wit beers are actually fermented with a mix of yeast strains, so you should be fine with what you get out of the bottle.

edit, my googling came up with


Hoegaarden Wit
Appears to be primary strain (probably Sacc. only). Good results. Powdery. Same as Wyeast 3944 Belgian White?

from http://www.nada.kth.se/~alun/Beer/Bottle-Yeasts/#BrDeKluis

Raffie

Recipes 

I'm thinking buy the liquid yeast, make 4 starters and freeze 3 and use 1.
Grown your own starters from the main and see if that works for ya.

BarryNL

Recipes 

Hmm on another talkboard I got: "We areBTW talking about Hoegaarden here and as NickMoore said no lesser authority than Mr Michael Jackson points out that Hoegaarden use a different strain in the bottle than the fermentor. "

Who knows? Maybe try it and see...

__________________
Brewing: Dunkelweizen '09, alt.beer.dusseldorf
Bottled: Erebus American IPA, Big 4-0 Barley Wine, Oranje Tripel, Got Milk Stout?
Planning: Oktoberfest, Peter the Grain RIS
Drinking: Abbey Daze, Best of 2008

homebrewer_99

Recipes 

I wish I would have known sooner...a coworker just left for Korea yesterday. I could have had him deliver...

__________________
HB Bill