How do I avoid chunky yeast?

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jaredkent

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So here's a question for you guys. I used White Labs WLP002 English Ale yeast recently on a brown ale. The strain of yeast was somewhat chunky. Now I just chalked this up to being a characteristic of that particular strain. When it came time to bottle my beer, all that chunkiness sat in the bottom of the bottle, which was unpleasant in the last sip or two of the bottle, but I typically pour into a glass anyway. The problem is I entered this beer into a competition (place 3rd in English Brown Ales), and one gripe was the chunky yeast. How could I avoid this, if thats how this particular strain is.

I did a search on here for "chunky yeast" and the thread that came up was referring to the exact same yeast strain, saying it looked like cottage cheese when it came time to shake and pitch the vial. I'd rather not switch strains, as I don't want the flavors changing too much, but is that my only option aside from kegging and force carbonating?
 
You don;t have any control over the characteristics of a yeast. So what if it's chunky or not. That's purely cosmetic.

If you have enough yeast in the bottom that you can tell if it's chunky or not then the problem is not with the yeast it's with your conditioning/ bottling process. Your transfering too much yeast over. That begs to the idea that you are probably not suing a long primary/or long enough secondary to remove the majority of the yeast from the beer BEFORE it gets into the bottle.

I have very little sedimentation in my bottles just a small enough of a smear in my bottles to get the job done. I use month long primaries. By the time I'm ready to bottle, the yeast layer in the bottom is so compacted that it's nearly a solid mass.

This is my yeastcake for my Sri Lankin Stout that sat in primary for 5 weeks. Notice how tight the yeast cake is? None of that got racked over to my bottling bucket. And the beer is extremely clear.

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That little bit of beer to the right is all of the 5 gallons that DIDN'T get vaccumed off the surface of the tight trub. Note how clear it is, there's little if any floaties in there.

When I put 5 gallons in my fermenter, I tend to get 5 gallons into bottles. The cake itself is like cement, it's about an inch thick and very, very dense, you can't just tilt your bucket and have it fall out. I had to use water pressure to get it to come out.

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This is the last little bit of the same beer in the bottling bucket, this is the only sediment that made it though and that was done on purpose, when I rack I always make sure to rub the autosiphon across the bottom of the primary to make sure there's plenty of yeast in suspension to carb the beer, but my bottles are all crystal clear and have little sediment in them.

Chilling them for a long time also helps compact what yeast layer there is inside the bottles. I once had a beer in the back of my fridge for like 3 months that was so tight you could totally upend the bottle and still no yeast came out.
 
That yeast is highly flocculent. I wouldn't worry about the chunks, that's just a characteristic of flocculent yeasts. Just be a bit more careful when you pour out the bottom third of your beer.

As for competitions, I'm not sure that even should have been taken into consideration in the judging of the beer - it's through no fault of your own. If the judge was knowledgeable, he should know that many english yeasts have medium to high flocculation.
 
+10 on what revvy said. Long primary is great. I also like to cold crash the whole fermenter for a week in my spare fridge.
 
I'd also have to blame the stewards for not carefully pouring out the beers. They're not pouring to the shoulder to leave the yeast behind. That's bottle conditioned beer pouring 101.
 
Thanks for the tips. The yeast bed was actually pretty compact, more compact then most of my other brews, but I'll try your tips and tighten my technique to avoid racking too much yeast over during my next batch.

And I agree with you about the pouring and knowledge of yeast strains. I got a 1/3 in appearance due to chunky beer. Though due to the amount of feedback on the scoresheets, I got the impression both judges were either fairly new, or brought in as fillers because they didn't have enough volunteers.

Apparently my bottle had overflowed when opening, which hadn't happened in any of the other 46 bottles of the batch. Not sure why it happened but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say that's why the yeast got stirred up instead of improper pouring.
 
I got a 1/3 in appearance due to chunky beer. Though due to the amount of feedback on the scoresheets, I got the impression both judges were either fairly new, or brought in as fillers because they didn't have enough volunteers.

A. You need to email those judges and kindly let them know this is a normal characteristic of highly flocculate english yeasts, and they might want to seek out a BJCP course before judging another competition.

B. You should email the competition coordinator, let him/her know about the feedback you received, and that the quality of judging is subpar at best.

That's probably one of the worst judging stories i've ever heard.
 
A. You need to email those judges and kindly let them know this is a normal characteristic of highly flocculate english yeasts, and they might want to seek out a BJCP course before judging another competition.

B. You should email the competition coordinator, let him/her know about the feedback you received, and that the quality of judging is subpar at best.

That's probably one of the worst judging stories i've ever heard.

Shot off an email today. There were a few problems on top of losing points for chunky yeast. Horrible math, one score off 3 points. A HUGE disagreement between the two judges a 32 and a 40, and was given almost opposite results between the two (one said dry, one said too sweet, one too much head, one not enough, etc.) Hard to get a read on where to improve under those circumstances.
 
That's, sadly, the norm for homebrew competitions - getting a good judge who is familiar with the style is much less common than it should be. You get similar quality feedback by going downtown and serving your beer to the residents of the local tent city.

I wish the AHA and BJCP would get their act together, considering how much people spend in terms of time and money to brew and ship beers to these competitions.
 
ArcaneXor said:
That's, sadly, the norm for homebrew competitions - getting a good judge who is familiar with the style is much less common than it should be. You get similar quality feedback by going downtown and serving your beer to the residents of the local tent city.

I wish the AHA and BJCP would get their act together, considering how much people spend in terms of time and money to brew and ship beers to these competitions.

That's not my experience normally. You get good and bad yes, but it's not the norm.

Why is that the BJCP's fault? They are doing all they can to improve comps and judging, including changing the format of the exam to allow more prospective judges. This hobby has blown up, the amount of entries to comps is rising at a huge rate.

Are you a certified judge? I'm of the opinion that competitive brewing is a communal hobby. If one has a problem with a lack of certified judges, they best damn be one or on a list to take the exam.
 
Got a response from the Chairman of their club. He was very understanding and explained what happened.

Here's the meat of the email:
You'll be happy to know that it's in our rules to setup every inexperienced judge with an experienced BJCP judge; no exception. Normally if there wouldn't be any BJCP judges available, the flight wouldn't be able to start judging, but we had an abundance of BJCP judges that day. I do know that the two individuals that judged your beer started out sitting with a BJCP judge, so that's covered. However, we received a few other entries where that judge's scoresheets were in a flight, then not in a flight. Yours appears to be one of the few.

I'm not certain when or why that judge took off, as they are not supposed to leave a flight with inexperienced judges; this goes directly against our rules. Moreover, those two judges' scores were not only added up incorrectly, but their sensory evaluations were all over the place (not just on your scoresheets), and the one judge to which you referred appears to have been prone not to "one word answers", but only two or three, maybe four -- still 100% absolutely unacceptable.
 
Are you a certified judge?

I will not further the BJCP monopoly by paying them to become their member, and would not want to be associated with them after seeing the truly atrocious scoresheets I have seen returned to friends who entered comps as prestigious as the nationals and had their beers tasted by people who obviously had never tasted an authentic example of the style before.
 
I will not further the BJCP monopoly by paying them to become their member, and would not want to be associated with them after seeing the truly atrocious scoresheets I have seen returned to friends who entered comps as prestigious as the nationals and had their beers tasted by people who obviously had never tasted an authentic example of the style before.

Agree 100%
 
ArcaneXor said:
I will not further the BJCP monopoly by paying them to become their member, and would not want to be associated with them after seeing the truly atrocious scoresheets I have seen returned to friends who entered comps as prestigious as the nationals and had their beers tasted by people who obviously had never tasted an authentic example of the style before.

Wow. Dude.
 
Wow. Dude.

My opinion is worded strongly, but I stand by it. Let me clarify that I have a lot of respect for qualified judges who volunteer at beer competitions, driving far and working hard for little more than a free lunch. My problem lies in the fact that the BJCP's de-facto monopoly on major beer competition has resulted in a bottleneck, because they cannot administer the tests quickly enough to keep pace with the increase in competition entries. This means that the existing good judges are overworked, and too often flights are judged by non-judges who simply don't have the necessary experience to do the job justice. I was looking into taking the exam, but would have had to wait something like a year and a half to take it, followed by (according to multiple reports) a wait in excess of another 4-6 months to have it graded. No thanks! Who knows if I'll even still live near the exam site then.
Maybe the new exam format will help - I hope it will. The AHA and BJCP have a lot of work to do after the first round nationals disaster in a couple of the regions this year.
 
It absolutely has to be stressed that no one is getting rich at the AHA. I don't understand your "monopoly" analogy. They're not stopping anyone from hosting a beer competition, they were just the first to do it. And they not only run competitions, they lobby for YOUR rights as homebrewer. The problem is the lack of judges. I've had crap score sheets too, but why is that the AHAs fault? They don't stop anyone from opening the style guidelines and reading them. I agree that nationals was a mess last year, but even in the worst region, they got it right in the end. The beers that advanced were brewed by some pretty prestigious brewers. Go volunteer at any competition you can until you get a crack at the exam. If you demonstrate some judging skill, they'll let you do it. They just don't have enough bodies to keep up with an exploding hobby. They shouldn't be villainized.
 
The monopoly comment refers to the fact that the BJCP system seems to be (as far as I know) the only one in use by the AHA (even though the BA has their own style guidelines), and the BJCP simply isn't churning out enough judges to make the system work as well as it should and could. Again, I wanted to become a judge at one point, but couldn't because the nearest open exam date at a location within reasonable driving distance was almost a year and a half in the future.

The problem with the AHA (of which I was until recently a member, and will be a member again starting next month) is that they don't seem to have the resources to ensure that their most prestigious homebrewing competition operates smoothly, because the regionals, as far as I know, are strictly volunteer-based and the AHA has little ability to intervene when things do not go as they should. To say that things turned out right this year is not correct, considering that participants in some regions were unable to re-brew their batches for the second round because they didn't know what beers advanced, nor what the judges (if they were lucky enough to get a judge and not just some homebrewer off the street) perceived as flaws. Other regions didn't have this problem, and those homebrewers had enough time for a re-brew.
I am confident that the AHA will take measures to at least partially fix the first-round issues, and hope that the web-based BJCP exam will allow them to produce more judges that are at least minimally prepared to give the entrants fair scores and reasonable feedback, considering that homebrewers often have multiple $100s invested in the nationals expecting a fair competition, and not a crapshoot. We shall wait and see what happens.
 
I just did a brown ale today using the London ESB from Wyeast. When I opened the pouches they looked chunky but seemed to smell ok. I pitched and checked on it a few hours later. All the yeast has settled and there is no apparent action. I know it's early, but it seems weird that there doesn't appear to be any yeast in moving around in the wort as of its trying to work. If I have ever had a slow starting yeast I have never seen it settle like that before. Any suggestions, guidance, tips?
 
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