Sufficient Yeast Cells In Suspension After Lagering?

Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum

Help Support Homebrew Talk - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Evan!

Well-Known Member
Joined
Aug 9, 2006
Messages
11,835
Reaction score
115
Location
Charlottesville, VA
This is my first time lagering---just got a chest freezer and temp controlled. I was wondering, since lagering causes yeast to fall out of suspension faster, will there be enough yeast cells left in suspension after a couple months of lagering, in order to sufficiently carbonate the beer in bottles?

Along those lines, I've been noticing that beers which get longer conditioning time in secondary take longer to carbonate in bottle. I'm guessing that this is due to less yeast in suspension. As such, with these beers, I've taken to deliberately disturbing the yeast cake when racking to the bottling bucket. Bad idea?
 
Rousing the yeast negates the purpose of using a clearing tank. You would probably be better off adding a little fresh yeast to the bottling bucket. That way you don't have hop particles, etc in the bottles. Also, the yeast in the clearing tank are the least floccuant yeast in the batch, which means a long clearing time in the bottle. Use a high flocculation yeast like Cooper's or Munton's Gold or safale S-04. You only need a pinch (AKA 1 gram).
 
Is there any risk, if you add a different strain of yeast to the bottling bucket, of potentially over-carbing the beer? Is there a danger that the new yeast will do a better job of consuming sugars that the original buggers left behind? Some yeasts will do a better job than others at consuming the fermentable sugars, right? Could that potentially result in what would effectively be a secondary fermentation in the bottle (the previously unconsumed sugars plus the priming solution).

Or, am I just completely bat-**** insane?
 
david_42 said:
Rousing the yeast negates the purpose of using a clearing tank. You would probably be better off adding a little fresh yeast to the bottling bucket. That way you don't have hop particles, etc in the bottles. Also, the yeast in the clearing tank are the least floccuant yeast in the batch, which means a long clearing time in the bottle. Use a high flocculation yeast like Cooper's or Munton's Gold or safale S-04. You only need a pinch (AKA 1 gram).

david, have you actually ever done that? I'd be scared of getting bottle bombs by adding highly active yeast to a finished brew. A package of Nottingham is 11.5 grams, so even a gram of dry yeast is a helluva lot of yeast.

How do those little carbonation pills that you add one per bottle work? Do they also require active yeast in suspension to do their thing?
 
Those drops are just pre-measured sugar. They kinda remind me of these candies that my grandparents always used to have around.
 
Ok, then you still have to have yeast. Introducing a controlled amount of yeast would be key, I suppose.
 
From all that I've read, you still have enough yeast in suspension, even after a long period of cold conditioning, to bottle-carb. I imagine it'll take a bit longer, though.
 
beer4breakfast said:
Ok, then you still have to have yeast. Introducing a controlled amount of yeast would be key, I suppose.
It's not the amount of yeast that's added, it's the amount of fermentables. The yeast will grow to match the amount of fermentables present if it is underpitched, and if overpitched it will just rapidly ferment whatever is there but it can't produce extra food.

When I am bottle priming and am planning to age a beer for more than 6-8 weeks in the secondary I like to harvest some yeast from the primary and save it in the fridge. I then reintroduce it to the secondary ~3 days before bottling which has always resulted in a good, clean bottle fermentation.
 
Well, in the instances where i disturbed the trub, I wasn't clarifying as much as I was conditioning. They were both stouts. And since both of them were actually in tertiary, the amount of trub was miniscule...shouldn't affect clarity at all.
 
As the Baron points out, no sugar no bombs. The only time this might be a concern, is if you followed a low attenuation yeast with a very high attenuation yeast for bottling. If you purposely used a low attenuation yeast in your brew, you could use something like Windsor for bottling.

Evan - understood. I was addressing the general case. You can't see through a proper stout anyway!
 
Chairman Cheyco said:
BvBG, do you harvest the yeast at high kreausen?
I've tried it both ways...harvesting at high kraeusen results in a very clean, easily acquired yeast as long as you skim the hop resins for the first 24hrs or so. I like this method and it is how top cropped yeasts are traditionally harvested.

OTOH, it's less labor intensive to just scoop some trub after racking. If it was a really hoppy beer or had lots of adjuncts I like to wash the yeast (one pass usually does it for me).
 
Baron von BeeGee said:
It's not the amount of yeast that's added, it's the amount of fermentables. The yeast will grow to match the amount of fermentables present if it is underpitched, and if overpitched it will just rapidly ferment whatever is there but it can't produce extra food.

When I am bottle priming and am planning to age a beer for more than 6-8 weeks in the secondary I like to harvest some yeast from the primary and save it in the fridge. I then reintroduce it to the secondary ~3 days before bottling which has always resulted in a good, clean bottle fermentation.

Thanks! That sounds like a great plan for the future. I want to start havesting, washing, and saving my yeast anyway. So far, I've been too lazy to bother since my only incentive was the moderate cost savings, but this gives me a more useful incentive.
 
Back
Top