Using yeast from commercial beers?

I'm about to brew a Hook Norton "Old Hooky" clone, and the bottles we buy have some yeast left in them...how hard is it to use this yeast? I'm not *too* fussed about using it instead of packet yeast, but it'd be a great addition!

The short answer is yes. I haven't yet done it, but apparently you'd have to build up a starter since there is so little in the bottle. Do a quick search here and you'll find a few topics on it.

B

You need to find out if the yeast is the fermentation strain or a bottling strain.

Very few breweries DON'T use the original strain in their bottles, mostly Belgians disguising their strain, and high grav beers that maybe used a champagne strain to aid in carbonation. Most of the time when we see yeast in the bottles, especially microbreweries like Rogue or even Bell's, it IS the strain.

It's not too hard to find out. I usually just google "Harvesting (beer name) yeast" and you can usually find a thread somewhere discussing whether or not it was successful.

This is a pretty good list of beers with harvestable yeasts, though it is waay incomplete and hasn't been updated. It's still a good source. http://www.nada.kth.se/~alun/Beer/Bottle-Yeasts//


One thing I have found that helps in successful harvesting, is to use the slurry from multiple bottles of the same beer. I did a really successful Hoegaarden harvest from 12 bottles. What I would do is after pouring the beer into a glass, I would spray the lip of the bottle with starsan and then re-cap with a sanitized cap. Then store in the fridge until I had enough bottles. Then on harvest day I would spray the caps again with starsan, open them, flame the lip of the bottles, and re-spray with sanitizer, then pour the dregs into my starter.

I ended up with 2 good sized mason jars with yeast. It's made some really tasty wits since then.

I find that for just starting off for harvesting yeast from a bottle this is a good thread. There's a video.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f12/pacman-yeast-starter-video-63855/

unionrdr said:

That's not what I said. Even Paul told me that the yeast in their kits IS NOT the same as their commercial yeast. Kit yeasts are something else entirely.

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Are you talking to me?

I was referencing ArcaneXor's comment, not yours.

My understanding is one of the reasons for Cooper's yeast still IN bottles, was specifically for homebrewrs to be able to harvest. Oz, is really in a lot of ways a difficult place to brew beer especially away from the cities, so Cooper's by leaving the yeast in the bottles and encouraging harvesting was a way to support the homebrewing communtiy.

I actually had a Cooper's Sparkling Ale and Outback Steakhouse last night. I though about pocketing the bottle and harvesting it.