I am brewing my first lager, a 2 gallon doppelbock. Its my understanding that i should add a little yeast to the bottling bucket to ensure there is enough yeast to carb the beer after a long lagering. How do i tell how much yeast to add? Do i need to activate it before mixing it in the bottling bucket?
I have done this before with good success. You can activate "proof" it if you want, it will reduce your alcohol content marginally on a 2 gallon batch. I did have to let the batch I did this with mature a little longer to let the yeast flavor settle down though...
You're doing a doppelbock with an ale strain? or is that just what you were going to carb with?
unless you're doing a very long lager, it shouldn't need more yeast. adding more may speed up the carbonation process, but there should be plenty left in suspension for carbonation
I used a lager yeast for fermentation (german bock). It was in primary for 2.5 weeks and lagered for 5 weeks. It partially froze during lagering. I was worried some of the yeast might have died and I would need to add a little more just for carbonating the beer. I was thinking I would mix 1/4 packet dry ale yeast into the bottling bucket to help with the carbonation.
1) unless you froze the whole carboy the yeast are fine. Only the yeast caught in the ice crystals will be dead. The thing behind this is the formation of ice causes the water molecules to expand and bread the cells walls killing the yeast.
2) the yeast are going to be extremely sluggish at bottle conditioning this is why people sometimes add ale yeast or krausen. The fresh yeast has not fallend from suspension and gone to sleep so they will quickly do the carbonation for you. The amount of sugar to be processed by the yeast during bottle conditioning is so small that adding ale yeast will not effect the flavor significantly. The process is to just boil your sugar as per normal, cool it and while it it cooling rehydrate your yeast, add your beer to the bottling bucket on top of the sugar and then add your rehydrated ale yeast. I would not add the yeast dry or rehydrated straight to the sugar solution as it is very concentrated and could harm the yeast.
3) If you are worried about using ale yeast then research krausening this is making a small batch of beer (some people make extra wort and freeze it for later use) add yeast and waiting until it is at high krasen, then taking a SG reading and calculating how much sugar is in the small batch and and add that to the bottling bucket along with the main batch of beer. It is complicated but it is the process used by traditional bottle conditioned german beers. There are some good sites that explain this process with formulas for SG of the beer and SG of the krasuen solution and volumes etc etc and this will work out how much to add.
Add yeast during bottling
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