Repitch on cake - Saison

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Tiroux

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Hey guys!

I have a clean blonde Saison (og 1052) that is in primary for more than 3 weeks now. I will bottle it on saturday, and I will brew an Imperial black Saison (og 1080ish) that I will pitch on the cake.

My question: should I use the whole cake, or use half of it, 1/3, 2/3?

I know that usually a whole cake is wayyyy too much cells, but I listened to the beersmith interview with Nathan Smith about saisons, and he was saying that saison yeasts need an higher cell count and an higher oxygenation.

It is the WLP566 Saison II
 
i would use a cup of yeast slurry.

Sounds about right. When I rack off the cake, I leave a little bit more liquid than some and add about 4 oz. of boiled, cooled water to it to swirl up the yeast. I then wash the yeast and almost always save 4 (8 oz) jars of slurry. I'd use one for each batch.

If you are concerned about the count, you certainly could use 1/3 of the cake. I put half a cake of WLP500 from a BPA in an 11% Belgian Strong and the strong came out quite nice.
 
Sounds about right. When I rack off the cake, I leave a little bit more liquid than some and add about 4 oz. of boiled, cooled water to it to swirl up the yeast. I then wash the yeast and almost always save 4 (8 oz) jars of slurry. I'd use one for each batch.

If you are concerned about the count, you certainly could use 1/3 of the cake. I put half a cake of WLP500 from a BPA in an 11% Belgian Strong and the strong came out quite nice.

I don't really wanna get into washing and reusing yeast. Most of the time I buy a new vial for each brew, because from my point of view the trouble and risks don't wort the price and the safety of a new vial. Anyway, here isn't the debate.

This time is just an exeption because I was brewing two saison in a row from the same yeast so...

So I guess I will rack of the Saison and then add maybe 0.5 or 1L of fresh wort to wakeup the yeast while I bottle the first one and brew the second one... then I use 1/3 of this slurry/now wort mixture
 
I don't really wanna get into washing and reusing yeast. Most of the time I buy a new vial for each brew, because from my point of view the trouble and risks don't wort the price and the safety of a new vial. Anyway, here isn't the debate.

This time is just an exeption because I was brewing two saison in a row from the same yeast so...

So I guess I will rack of the Saison and then add maybe 0.5 or 1L of fresh wort to wakeup the yeast while I bottle the first one and brew the second one... then I use 1/3 of this slurry/now wort mixture

If you don't want / need any of the other yeast, just add a little bit of water to the empty bucket/carboy so you can swirl up the cake. I'd pour that into a quart jar / big plastic cup something so you can let the trub settle out and after a few min pour out about 12 oz of yeast slurry into another container. I can't imagine that you'll need to wake up the yeast at all, since its coming right out of a fermentor. I'd then just direct pitch.
 
Mr Malty has a pitching calculator for just this scenario: http://www.mrmalty.com/calc/calc.html Choose the "Repitching from Slurry" tab and hover over the slider arrows for the tooltip instructions. It's not an exact calculation since you don't know exactly how much yeast is in the trub, but it should give you a good idea. You can always pitch a bit more than the calculator tells you with negligible ill effect if you're worried about underpitching.

You also need VERY little liquid to swirl up the yeast at the bottom of the bucket/carboy. The past couple batches I have just finished siphoning the beer off and swirled what beer was left (and what was left was almost nothing) and was able to get it fluid enough to pour out or scoop out however much I needed. Just make sure whatever you pour into or scoop with is sanitized well.
 
I've pitched on full yeast cakes many times and haven't noticed a negative effect to the beer. I have noticed an unproportionately large amount of sediment and what seems to be a slightly smaller batch size coming out after fermentation, but nothing in the way of flavors/aromas. Everytime has been a relatively neutral yeast in terms of flavor/aroma.

Saisons (belgian yeasts) have the ester/phenol factor that needs to be considered when pitching. Some folks say to slightly underpitch saisons (no more than 10%) to enhance these characteristics, while others simply recommend using temperature to enhance these characteristics. I do think that one thing is generally considered true and that is that overpitching will decrease these characteristics somewhat - not completely because that's the nature of the yeast but slightly subdued maybe.

If you are not concerned about maximizing the ester/phenol aspects of the yeast and would be fine with potentially having slightly subdued ester/phenols then I would say just pitch on the whole yeast cake. Don't add water or wort and swirl - you risk contamination. Just bottle your beer, keep the yeastcake bucket covered, brew your next beer and when it's cooled then pour it right on top of the yeastcake (no additional oxygen needed or aeration because the yeast will not be reproducing - they go straight to alcohol production mode -Edit: see my rationale 2 posts below). You may want to give a good little shake to break up and mix the yeast but that's all there is to it. You will want to cool your next saison to 65F - no higher - before putting on the cake. The combination of a ton of yeast plus a ton of sugar plus a high temperature will result in a volcano in a little time, but if you drop the wort temp down to 65F then you give yourself a little cushion and extra time. Plus it gives you time to see things when they're starting to happen so you can prep temperature control techniques.

Keep in mind that you will see MAJOR activity within 1-2 hours of pitching on a yeastcake and fermentation will likely be finished within a couple days, of course there's no substitute for gravity readings. The yeast don't need to be awakened at 3 weeks; they're starving the ready to go!!
 
"...then pour it right on top of the yeastcake (no additional oxygen needed or aeration because the yeast will not be reproducing - they go straight to alcohol production mode).

Humm.... I had not heard that.

So the yeast will not reproduce or they will eproduce at a lower rate...

I guess I need to go re-read the book on the yeast lifecycle...

DPB
 
Humm.... I had not heard that.

So the yeast will not reproduce or they will eproduce at a lower rate...

I guess I need to go re-read the book on the yeast lifecycle...

DPB

I should qualify that by stating that I'm just an average person; no biology degree of any kind and certainly no specific qualifications in yeast lifecycles. I've just done a lot of various reading online and in non-yeast specific brewing book but have NOT read the book 'Yeast' by JZ and CW, although it's on my list of books to buy :D

What I posted above is based on my understanding of the yeast lifecycle and nutrient requirements for their phases. When the oxygen runs out (log phase when o2 is used) in the wort the yeast move to the growth phase where they reproduce and make alcohol. Given that they don't have the essentials for reproduction you are left with little reproduction and most of the "old guys" have to do the bulk of the work, thus stressing them even more then they might be from the first beer. The idea here being that we're not trying to further create healthy yeast, nor provide them the reserves for reproduction. We're just simply trying to use them to complete exhaustion without caring about their health (I know, sounds terrible :eek:) - who cares if they get stressed because they're going in the compost next :p. I'm sure that my understanding of this aspect is not perfect but it's what I've gathered up to this point.
 
Thanks for the great replies!

In fact, at first it was my idea to simply pitch the new wort on the whole cake... I don't remember who conviced me to not do it. Maybe my own freak perfectionnist side, ahah.

My plan is to cool the wort to 65 and place it in a 65 degrees room and let it ramp up to whatever, then bring it upstairs to maintain 75-80 degres. I will also do a transfert to secondary to get off that old.

Good points on both sides... I have to make a choice.
 
The growth phase is where most of the flavor and aroma compounds come from (http://www.wyeastlab.com/he-yeast-fundamentals.cfm). So it seems to me for a Saison where the flavor is all yeast based pitching the normal amount of healthy yeast in order for them to go through their normal lifecycle phases would in the end produce the beer you want. If you skip the growth phase you might be missing out on a lot of the delicious "Saison-y" flavors those yeast give off.

Jamil did an experiment where he pitched enough yeast in a batch to not need any reproduction and he claimed that the beer tasted too clean and didn't taste right. It was in one of his Jamil Show podcasts where he discussed it but I don't remember which one sorry. I have also read of a homebrewer doing a pitching experiment where they under and over pitched by specific amounts on the same batch of wort and if memory serves me, there was little difference in flavor until the pitch was somewhere around 4x the recommended amount. so under-pitching or over-pitching by a little probably will have minimal effects, but massively overpitching could have more noticeable effects. Maybe better to experiment with a smaller batch and see the difference for a very distinctly flavored yeast like a saison yeast. I'm guessing the effects are less noticeable on something like 1056 since it's pretty clean to begin with.

Disclaimer: I have not read "Yeast" by Jamil yet either though it's sitting on my nightstand for me to do so one day .. . This is all from reading things here on HBT and a lot from listening to almost every BJCP style episode of The Jamil Show
 
The growth phase is where most of the flavor and aroma compounds come from (http://www.wyeastlab.com/he-yeast-fundamentals.cfm). So it seems to me for a Saison where the flavor is all yeast based pitching the normal amount of healthy yeast in order for them to go through their normal lifecycle phases would in the end produce the beer you want. If you skip the growth phase you might be missing out on a lot of the delicious "Saison-y" flavors those yeast give off.

Jamil did an experiment where he pitched enough yeast in a batch to not need any reproduction and he claimed that the beer tasted too clean and didn't taste right. It was in one of his Jamil Show podcasts where he discussed it but I don't remember which one sorry. I have also read of a homebrewer doing a pitching experiment where they under and over pitched by specific amounts on the same batch of wort and if memory serves me, there was little difference in flavor until the pitch was somewhere around 4x the recommended amount. so under-pitching or over-pitching by a little probably will have minimal effects, but massively overpitching could have more noticeable effects. Maybe better to experiment with a smaller batch and see the difference for a very distinctly flavored yeast like a saison yeast. I'm guessing the effects are less noticeable on something like 1056 since it's pretty clean to begin with.

Disclaimer: I have not read "Yeast" by Jamil yet either though it's sitting on my nightstand for me to do so one day .. . This is all from reading things here on HBT and a lot from listening to almost every BJCP style episode of The Jamil Show


That's a point I already considered.. and it's a good one. But you know... it's gonna be an Imperial Black Saison with a lot of stuff and flavors in it, and I will ramp up the temperation pretty high. All that together should give me a lot of flavor.
 
That's a point I already considered.. and it's a good one. But you know... it's gonna be an Imperial Black Saison with a lot of stuff and flavors in it, and I will ramp up the temperation pretty high. All that together should give me a lot of flavor.

Lots and lots, too much, maybe...;)
 
Lots and lots, too much, maybe...;)

Yhea I guess it's gonna be a really bad beer.

It's not a 17% bourbon barell aged smoked black saison... it's simply a trappist ale fermented with a saison strain to get less residual sugar and a bit more spiciness.

If 1080 is too much well... I'll be sad lol
 
Yhea I guess it's gonna be a really bad beer.

It's not a 17% bourbon barell aged smoked black saison... it's simply a trappist ale fermented with a saison strain to get less residual sugar and a bit more spiciness.

If 1080 is too much well... I'll be sad lol

Just jumping of a cliff, not from an airplane! ;)
 
Thanks for the great replies!

In fact, at first it was my idea to simply pitch the new wort on the whole cake... I don't remember who conviced me to not do it. Maybe my own freak perfectionnist side, ahah.

My plan is to cool the wort to 65 and place it in a 65 degrees room and let it ramp up to whatever, then bring it upstairs to maintain 75-80 degres. I will also do a transfert to secondary to get off that old.

Good points on both sides... I have to make a choice.

So... you will KNOW if there is a "Whole-lot-a-Bunch" more yeast produced and will be the SME!

If you are interested in reusing your yeast I suggest you read this and this guys other experiments.

http://woodlandbrew.blogspot.com/2013/01/yeast-washing-revisited.html
 
In addition to mrmalty's slurry calculator, also run your batch through yeastcalc as if it were a 5-gal starter. So say you start with 200B cells and after your 5-gal "starter" you have 1,000 B cells. If your next batch calls for 350B cells, then you should pitch around a third of your reclaimed yeast.

Search youtube for "Neva Parker" (white labs). In her presentation, starting around 10:00, she explains that pitching half to twice the recommended rate won't have much effect on speed or attenuation, but the resulting yeast growth can impact flavor. Especially so with a yeast like 3711 I'd expect.
 
In addition to mrmalty's slurry calculator, also run your batch through yeastcalc as if it were a 5-gal starter. So say you start with 200B cells and after your 5-gal "starter" you have 1,000 B cells. If your next batch calls for 350B cells, then you should pitch around a third of your reclaimed yeast.

Search youtube for "Neva Parker" (white labs). In her presentation, starting around 10:00, she explains that pitching half to twice the recommended rate won't have much effect on speed or attenuation, but the resulting yeast growth can impact flavor. Especially so with a yeast like 3711 I'd expect.

I have seen this presentation in fact. I should rewatch it. That's a good point here...

If I use your technique, which mean calculate a 5gallon starter starting with 200M (which was my iniatial starter), with no stir plate, it gives me 850M, and I need 290M for my new batch... so it's pretty close from a third of the cake.

I might juste do that... swirl up the cake and use the third to inoculate my new wort.
 
We can tell as much as we know and our own opinions/experiences/knowledge on pitching on yeast cakes but you'll only ever form your own opinion and experiences by doing it yourself. You may like the outcome and you may not, that's for you to decide. I've done it and have liked my outcome, but I don't do it everytime.

I'd be interested to know what you finally end up doing and the outcome from it. Using a saison yeast strain for a trappist ale sounds intriguing. Keep us posted.
 
We can tell as much as we know and our own opinions/experiences/knowledge on pitching on yeast cakes but you'll only ever form your own opinion and experiences by doing it yourself. You may like the outcome and you may not, that's for you to decide. I've done it and have liked my outcome, but I don't do it everytime.

I'd be interested to know what you finally end up doing and the outcome from it. Using a saison yeast strain for a trappist ale sounds intriguing. Keep us posted.

I will.
In fact, the idea came to me after i tasted a WONDERFUL beer from Dieu du Ciel, which fermented, this winter, their normal Imperial Stout with a Saison yeast, adding some spices to it. OMG that was a revelation, the most incredible beer I had tasted in a long while.

It's also one of a series. I'm brewing 4 Saisons in a row, and if they turn out great, I will be brewing a Saison each season...

Winter: Imperial Black Saison
Spring: Citra Wheat Saison
Summer: Traditionnel Saison
Autumn: Brett Saison aged on apple brandy oak chips
 
I have seen this presentation in fact. I should rewatch it. That's a good point here...

If I use your technique, which mean calculate a 5gallon starter starting with 200M (which was my iniatial starter), with no stir plate, it gives me 850M, and I need 290M for my new batch... so it's pretty close from a third of the cake.

I might juste do that... swirl up the cake and use the third to inoculate my new wort.
And you'll find that it kinda agrees with the Mrmalty slurry calculator. The problem with the slurry calcs is they totally depend on yeast density, and thus how long it has rested.

If you're doing 3 more saisons, it sounds like you're all set on yeast! Just pour your 850B cells from this batch into 3 jars and use one jar for each next batch. Unless you feel like playing with inoculation rates, which may be an interesting experiment.
 
Two are already brewed, the brett was wlp670 farmhouse blend. There still the citra one to brew... Maybe i'll brew it in a test batch size in biab the same day and then use a part of the cake... Maybe!
 
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