Pitching with active krausen

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NastyN8

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For the past few months, I've been harvesting active krausen to pitch into my new beers. I do nothing more than scrape at least half of the active krausen and dumping it onto a cooled wort, without getting too much fermenting beer into the new vessel. I haven't had one problem in over ten beers from the same white labs California Ale yeast starter. In fact, it's usually faster to get a beer fermenting this way than even a yeast starter.

My question is, has anyone actually done this for a long time? (at least on this site)

Also: Am I thinking wrong with doing this even though I've had fantastic results?

FYI, I brew a lot of beer, so I always have an active brew to harvest from.
 
NastyN8 said:
For the past few months, I've been harvesting active krausen to pitch into my new beers. I do nothing more than scrape at least half of the active krausen and dumping it onto a cooled wort, without getting too much fermenting beer into the new vessel. I haven't had one problem in over ten beers from the same white labs California Ale yeast starter. In fact, it's usually faster to get a beer fermenting this way than even a yeast starter.

My question is, has anyone actually done this for a long time? (at least on this site)

Also: Am I thinking wrong with doing this even though I've had fantastic results?

FYI, I brew a lot of beer, so I always have an active brew to harvest from.
Click to expand...

nothing wrong with doing that especially if you are brewing lots of beer. you are probably selecting a certain kind of yeast in some way but someone smarter than i can comment on that.
 
I've had the same kind of fermentation and flavor as with the original batch of WLP001 I used. I was kind of afraid of another yeast overtaking the original, but so far it's been the dominant yeast, at least as far as I can tell.

I pitched today 6 hours ago using about half the krausen of a beer that's been fermenting for a week and it's already bubbling away.
 
I just started doing this a couple of months ago and have done about as many batches this way as you have. My results are similar. I've done it with WY1007 and 1056. Wow do the fermentations ever take off. I'd appreciate expert opinion as well, but for now i plan to keep doing it.
 
it is an age old method, that's for sure. i think there are breweries today that top crop and repitch yeast, certainly many german breweries do this.
 
eastoak said:
it is an age old method, that's for sure. i think there are breweries today that top crop and repitch yeast, certainly many german breweries do this.
Click to expand...
I knew that this was an older method (I'm very intrigued by traditional brewing) but I haven't found a lot of info on it.

But hey, if it works and it saves you a ton of money, then why not?

Also, pitching a huge amount of active yeast onto cooled wort starts the fermentation process before any chance of getting infected. At least that's what I've noticed since I started doing this.
 

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