Beer Yeast Cake, Which Bottles Have Culturable Cider Yeast

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Ulixes

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Hey guys,

Two questions:

1) What sort of off-flavors will I get if I use a yeast cake from one of the last batches of beer? (Safale 05, and there's some Wyeast cakes, too.) Hop aroma, funky aftertaste? What all would I come up against?

2) What commercially available ciders have culturable yeast? And if I just pour the bottle into a batch, would it ferment well enough?
 
I just tried a couple of batches and I'm not real happy with the results of the US-05. I've had excellent results with S-04 though. I hope you had better results than me. I had thought it was supposed to flocculate more and provide a cleaner profile, but I ended up with a fluffy billowing yeast cake and more lees in my bottles than any other yeast. odd, but it just never cleared all that well and tastes a little more sour than normal.

My guess is that in a nice clean dry cider you might get some residual flavor from the yeast cake if you don't wash it first. My biggest concern would be how hard they had to work on the beer. Was it a high gravity that they had to bend over backwards to ferment? Was it fermented at low range or high range of the yeast? There's probably going to be a lot of variables. I'd say you'll probably never know until you just go for it.

On your second question, if you do find a bottle with yeast in it, you'd probably need to create a starter. Dumping a half ounce of cider from the bottom of a bottle into a 5 gallon batch of juice probably won't be enough cells.
 
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