Yeast Cake with Oak

I recently brewed an oaked IPA with chips put in primary. I want to pitch a barley wine onto the cake but there are going to be bits of oak in there. This is not ideal.

Here is what I think my options are.

1. Put the cake into suspension and strain the oak out
2. Build up a giant starter
3. Stop working about it and live with the risk that used oak chips will ruin my first attempt at a big beer

What do you think?

First of all fruit/oaking gets done in the secondary so this could be fixed by racking to secondary over the chips and washing the yeast from primary for next batch

OR

Just washing your yeast in primary now,
Add 2L of clean sanitized water to the cake, mix up and pour into a large sanitized bowl/mason jar
Wait 10 minutes and you should see a lot of trub/protien/oakchips on the bottom.
Carefully decant the cloudy yeast water into another jar where you can let it settle and voila clean yeast cake for repitching/stepping up depending on how much you get from this process.

I wouldn't worry about the oak...1) oak is great for a BW and 2) it'll get covered almost immediately with trub and won't contribute much

Johnnyhitch1 said:

First of all fruit/oaking gets done in the secondary.

Click to expand...

Have you listened to the Brewing network's interview with Shea? My opinion on when the oak should be added completely changed after listening to it. There are sugar additions made by the toasted oak that provide a more complex mouth feel if the oak goes in primary.

I think I am just going to wash the cake and decant, that will solve the oak problem farley well. Thanks for the feed back.

Don't worry about them, the Oak Chips probably don't have much more flavor to contribute. They will not hurt the next beer.

I have bits of oak staves in my Lambics, and I transfer them from one beer as I bottle it to the next new one. Some of these pieces of oak have been in beer for over 2 years.

I think you'll be OK either way. Oaked BW is awesome, but I doubt you'll get too much flavor from what's in the yeast.

randmc said:

Have you listened to the Brewing network's interview with Shea? My opinion on when the oak should be added completely changed after listening to it. There are sugar additions made by the toasted oak that provide a more complex mouth feel if the oak goes in primary.

Click to expand...

I have to look into this.
I would assume its possibly the cellulose in the wood that the yeast can munch on as they start to clean up. Almost like brett in barrels?

Interesting...

Johnnyhitch1 said:

I have to look into this.
I would assume its possibly the cellulose in the wood that the yeast can munch on as they start to clean up. Almost like brett in barrels?

Interesting...

Click to expand...

This is a pretty long podcast, but tons of info. The oak discussion starts about 3/4 of the way through.

http://www.thebrewingnetwork.com/shows/The-Sunday-Session/The-Sunday-Session-11-23-08-Shea-Comfort