franknorrispr

Recipes 

A friend of mine did a Hefeweizen and used wyeast 3068. It's been 9 days in the primary fermentation and still has the yeast cake on top. I'm wondering why it hasn't gone to the bottom by now!

Any insight on why this is happening. Anyone that's familiar with this yeast strain

Link81688

Recipes 

That happened to me, except using wlp300. It stayed for 12 days. It ended up tasting great.

Mike_A

Recipes 

Most hefeweizen style yeasts (WY3068, WLP300, WLP320 for example) are extremely vigorous top-fermenting yeasts. What you're seeing is the kreuzen, not the yeast cake. If you look at the bottom of the fermentation vessel (I guess you can only do this with clear vessels) there will be a thick yeast cake at the bottom. I've now done 5 batches with these yeasts and every time the kreuzen is extremely thick & healthy looking. There's nothing wrong with that kreuzen hanging around until that beer is ready to rack to secondary. If you get an equally thick kreuzen on your secondary, it's wasn't close enough to being done fermenting in primary.

jtakacs

Recipes 

i'm bottling a belgian wit this weekend - it was in primary for 17 days and had a full krausen until the last couple of days. its in secondary (really just clarifying) now... tastes great. don't worry. (wy3944)

franknorrispr

Recipes 

Other thing is that my friend told me that he dropped the hydrometer inside the fermenting bucket and the gravity is between 1.030 and 1.040 (He didn't took the SG) I don't know if he is taking the reading in a wrong way but that doesn't seem right to me. By now the reading should be lower.

Should he swirl the krausen on top?
The yeast was a couple of months old, should he pitch a new pack of yeast?
or, Should he lets the beer a couple of more days in the primary fermenter to see what happens?

jtakacs

Recipes 

you could rouse it, but for sure don't bottle it at that gravity.