Pitching yeast for conditioning?

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Bigsnake

Bigsnake

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Just wondering about this one. I hear of the Trappist beers often having different yeast for the bottle conditioning than fermentations. I've also heard of people having carbing problems when they use some or multiple clarifying techniques since there aren't enough yeast left in suspensions.

So, how would you go about pitching yeast into a beer for bottle conditioning? Pitch rate? Sure you don't want it too high. Would you just make a small starter, pitch the sediment, and gently stir to mix like with the priming sugar?
 
I recently made a belgian strong that turned out amazing. I lagered the beer for over a month, so I knew my yeast wouldn't be viable to carbonate this one. I just bought another Wyeast smack pack and pitched it, and it turned out great.

My line of thinking was that the dextrose I added would determine the carbonation level rather than the amount of yeast. Once the yeast runs out of food, it's not going to carbonate the beer any more.

I don't have any info on pitching rates, but I'd be interested in knowing if a Propagator pack would be a sufficient amount of yeast.
 
Nyxator said:
I recently made a belgian strong that turned out amazing. I lagered the beer for over a month, so I knew my yeast wouldn't be viable to carbonate this one. I just bought another Wyeast smack pack and pitched it, and it turned out great.

My line of thinking was that the dextrose I added would determine the carbonation level rather than the amount of yeast. Once the yeast runs out of food, it's not going to carbonate the beer any more.

I don't have any info on pitching rates, but I'd be interested in knowing if a Propagator pack would be a sufficient amount of yeast.
Click to expand...

It seems like you really could go with a good bit of a lower pitch rate. It's just a small amount of sugar in there so I don't think they'll multiply that much, if at all, because of the lack of O2.

Plus, don't the Activator packs have a bunch of yeast nutrients in the smack pack part? I think you'd want to leave that out of your beer as well. Guess pitch a propagator pack or a smack pack w/o smacking it.
 
All yeast strains attenuate at slightly different rates, and champagne yeast happens to attenuate way more than most beer yeasts. So a a lot of sugars that your original yeast didn't consume will be consumed by the champagne yeast, increasing your carbonation by some unknown amount.
 

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