Pacman harvest

I was about to post a thread about rogues dead guy ale asking if people are having issues bottle harvesting.

Used a tiger malt beverage exactly like Malta and went through proper procedure dumping last 1/4" of beer into the capturing jar.

Well I've been so busy it's now a week and half later and low and behold it has fermented . Foam on top yeast sediment on the bottom.

I think part of the issue lies with the fact that every bottle at the local lcbo had no visible yeast sediment, at all even after refrigerating for hours I looked after pouring it and nothing.

There must have been the most minuscule amount and that was a factor in the long time to build a population.

Now it's time to build her up.

One trick is to use multiple bottles of beer, the more you use the more you increase the odds. I once harvesting Hoegaarden yeast by using the dregs of 2 6 packs of it. I drank it over the course of a wee, two a night, after I poured the beer in a glass, I flamed the bottle, sparyed the mouth with starsan, along with the cap and re-capped the dregs and stored them in the fridge til I had enough to use. Then I flamed and resprayed the bottles and made my starter.

How much slurry do I need? I'm just going to dump off liquid after fermentation and dump slurry into larger vessel with more starter wort until I have enough.

Say my container is 4 inches diameter do I need 1" of slurry.
I could look it up probably .

Shakespeare Stout is the bottle to cultivate yeast from. It's chocked full of yeast.

ultravista said:

Shakespeare Stout is the bottle to cultivate yeast from. It's chocked full of yeast.

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Yeah but what kind of yeast and I haven't seen shakespeare at my liquor stores.

But again when someone gets a sec just let me know how much slurry for 5-6 gal. Batch. Doing double ipa around 7% .

ultravista said:

Shakespeare Stout is the bottle to cultivate yeast from. It's chocked full of yeast.

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+1 to using Shakespeare Stout. Both will work but the stout has plenty of yeast. I bought a 22 oz bottle and just built up the colony from that.

Ozzfest05 said:

Yeah but what kind of yeast and I haven't seen shakespeare at my liquor stores.

But again when someone gets a sec just let me know how much slurry for 5-6 gal. Batch. Doing double ipa around 7% .

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I would need more specific info to give you details but here is a guesstimate based on the info you provided.

For 5.5G @ 1.065 you would need approx 247 Billion cells.

figure about 3 billion cells per ml of slurry (estimate) and 10% non-yeast material

Based on this you would need right about 100 ML of slurry. Look at a mason jar and most have ML marked off in 100's.

Again this is very dependant on the process and percentages. I would suggest playing around with Mrmalty.com yeast calculator. Should be able to answer many of your yeast questions.

Ozzfest05 said:

Yeah but what kind of yeast.

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Pacman

I'm a big fan of cultivating yeast from bottles. I just harvested yeast from The Boulevard/Deschutes collaboration #2 earlier tonight. Why would you want to harvest a yeast that is already available through wyeast? The cost of the beer and then the time spent, and uncertainity if you'll get a successful harvest, seems like it would be better to just buy a smack pack. Just my 2cents, not trying to be rude.

jusware said:

I'm a big fan of cultivating yeast from bottles. I just harvested yeast from The Boulevard/Deschutes collaboration #2 earlier tonight. Why would you want to harvest a yeast that is already available through wyeast? The cost of the beer and then the time spent, and uncertainity if you'll get a successful harvest, seems like it would be better to just buy a smack pack. Just my 2cents, not trying to be rude.

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Cause it's not readily available. I had rogue on hand. I used a 79c bottle of tiger malt to harvest and time well I put it in a closet and let it sit.

So in total it may have cost 3 dollars if that.

jusware said:

I'm a big fan of cultivating yeast from bottles. I just harvested yeast from The Boulevard/Deschutes collaboration #2 earlier tonight. Why would you want to harvest a yeast that is already available through wyeast? The cost of the beer and then the time spent, and uncertainity if you'll get a successful harvest, seems like it would be better to just buy a smack pack. Just my 2cents, not trying to be rude.

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You're aware they bottle with a champagne yeast, right?

Ozzfest05 said:

Cause it's not readily available. I had rogue on hand. I used a 79c bottle of tiger malt to harvest and time well I put it in a closet and let it sit.

So in total it may have cost 3 dollars if that.

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They don't use pacman to bottle. They add a champagne yeast at bottling. So you are correct that you can harvest from rogue, but you're not harvesting pacman. I think the exception to that is Shakespeare stout. May be one other that you can get pacman from, but not sure

Rebel Brewer has pacman yeast from sale 699 a pack. That's not a price considering the bottles are 699 and don't have pacman it it anyway.

motleybrews said:

They don't use pacman to bottle. They add a champagne yeast at bottling. So you are correct that you can harvest from rogue, but you're not harvesting pacman. I think the exception to that is Shakespeare stout. May be one other that you can get pacman from, but not sure

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I'm going to clarify this for people. In Canada I can't get any liquid yeast , I would have to pay 10 + shipping which I'm not going to do.

For those of you who say rogue uses champagne yeast to bottle I say, hmmm , ok.

I've read 30+ threads all saying they use pacman. One thread shows a guy using rogue to harvest with pics , steps it up then brews a beer and he said it turned out great. Another thread the guy went on a brewery tour and was told pacman was used at conditioning.

My total investment in this yeast harvest so far was 79c . That's just the bottom line, I have yeast now and just need to step it up.

There's a commercial harvest list and rogue is listed on their for pacman harvestable.

I just started a new Pacman culture from two bottles of Yellow Snow. It was taking off within 8 hours in the 150mL starter wort, so I'd say there was plenty of viable yeast in the two bottles I harvested from.

motleybrews said:

They don't use pacman to bottle. They add a champagne yeast at bottling. So you are correct that you can harvest from rogue, but you're not harvesting pacman. I think the exception to that is Shakespeare stout. May be one other that you can get pacman from, but not sure

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I don't know where you got that info. But in the case of the bombers, if it has the words Pac Man Yeast silk screend on the label, it's pac man. Folks have been harvesting from bottles for years. Noone's declared that it was champagne yeast before.

Sources please.....

That's the only issue I have with this forum Revvy . I come here because there's a wealth of info and very knowledgable people who help you figure out answers to question you may not find anywhere else.

However on the same note people come on and post a complete contradiction to what you were told or read through on stickies without any sources to their info.

Meanwhile my question was in regards to yeast slurry quantity for pitching into 5 gals. Which br1dge answered , thanks.

And I give mr malty a whirl.
I will just build it up then make a starter and pitch at high Krausen.

It should be easy to figure out the yeast type. Cultivate it in maltose, wine yeast cannot convert maltose so if it's Champagne yeast nothing will hapen in a maltose environment.

Here is a good thread about harvesting commercial yeast. mny members have harvested Pacman from Rogue brews.

http://https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f163/commercial-beer-yeast-harvest-list-262713/

FYI, I've had really great results with harvesting from their Yellow Snow IPA.

motleybrews said:

They don't use pacman to bottle. They add a champagne yeast at bottling. So you are correct that you can harvest from rogue, but you're not harvesting pacman. I think the exception to that is Shakespeare stout. May be one other that you can get pacman from, but not sure

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Nope, not at all. Rogue ales DO NOT use champagne yeast to bottle. Very few of them are filtered at all, and when they are filtered it's Pacman used for bottling.

I've had the best luck with shakespear and yellow snow myself. The worst with deadguy.

Revvy said:

I've had the best luck with shakespear and yellow snow myself. The worst with deadguy.

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Dead Guy _may_ be filtered. I've got to call John this week, so I'll try to remember to ask him.

Denny said:

Dead Guy _may_ be filtered. I've got to call John this week, so I'll try to remember to ask him.

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I have a good population from dead guy.I've seen other threads with dead guy harvest but I do believe there is very little yeast in those bottles.

I just decanted and added more Malta Goya to my attempted harvest from a bomber of chocolate stout and a growler of Dead Guy. I wasn't expecting to see any sediment from the Dead Guy, but in the last glass of it, there was a nice little layer on the bottom. Cutting the Malta with equal parts of water works well. I haven't a stir plate, and still got activity after five days of going to the closet and shaking the bejeezus out of the flask.

It's a lot of fun playing mad scientist.

Ozzfest05 said:

That's the only issue I have with this forum Revvy . I come here because there's a wealth of info and very knowledgable people who help you figure out answers to question you may not find anywhere else.

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You're gonna find that anywhere, it's the internets. But here we do police that stuff quite frequently. We'll call folks out if we think they're giving bogus info. (That's why some folks don't like, because I'll call them on their **** if I see inaccurate info, and I'll be pretty blunt doing it.) And we'll tried to provide some form of citations to back us up. Honestly on here, if it's a question about yeast, I'd look at what Denny has to say about it, not many folks actually have a commercial strain named for them after all.

That is impressive, I'll Definetely listen to him. Thanks

Just had a bottle of Chatoe Rogue Single Malt Ale. In addition to being another great Rogue beer, it had an impressive sedimentation at the bottom of the bottle.

I harvested pacman from two 12oz bottles of Mocha Porter - used a stir plate and built it up to 4.5L - split it in half and just used the first 2.25 liters in a stout that we made this weekend...

Living in the Southeast and being outside of Georgia, Dead Guy is one of only two Rogue brews that I can even find. My Pacman batches came from Dead Guy (12 oz bottles) with no problems whatsoever (and coincidently the first couple steps I did from Malta and later migrated to AG wort). That said, I've migrated to stepping it up to manageable levels inside the bottle. You can get to 500ml - 1000ml starter levels in only wort infusions.