wyeast 3068 advise

Hi I am going to be brewing a dunkleweizen recipe which calls for 3068 yeast. I would like to achie e a good balance between cloves and banana. I looked at the yeast manufacturer website and it gave some high level advise. Does anyone have some specific advise for me to achie e.this? Like lurching rate, starter or no, fermentation temps at different stages.

Thanks

The best wheat beer I ever drank was made by another local homebrewer in Athens, he told me he uses 3068 and starts the fermentation off in the low 50's and slowly creeps up the temp as it begins to finish out.

I don't remember if he said he did a starter.

I just got one smack pack. does anyone have any advice on what yeast pitching temp should be? also I think Im going to ferment at 68 degrees for the first 2 days and then drop it down to 65. what do you guys think? or should I just keep it at 68 the whole time?

How is it you plan to keep the wort at 68 degrees and then take it down to 65, exactly?

I use 3068 in all my German wheats. I would not start high and end low, if anything, do the opposite. I start on the lower end, with a 1.5L starter (for a 1.056 batch), pitch at 62ish and let it go from there. Once it finishes going crazy, it tends to stay at 68.

My German wheats have a nice clove/banana balance when all is said and done.

I try to pitch and keep it at 68 when I use it. I should try starting lower though one day since I hear people get good results doing that.

FYI, this one ferments like a beast, so prepare for that. Every time I use it I have a blowout!

Braufguss has the right idea. I really wouldn't stress out about 3068. If you're intention is to achieve that banana and clove profile then anything about 65 degrees should be fine. I have fermented with that strain with temps as high as 78 degrees without any adversity.

When brewing in the summer, I encourage others to brew Saisons, trappists (esp dubbels), and wheats because their high fermentation ranges allow for the onset of fruity esters. Who doesn't want a unique finish? As my great-grandfather used to say: It grows with the warmth, it goes to the pate, it finishes fruity with 3068.

Great question! There are varying opinions on this site regarding best fermentation temp for this yeast, ranging roughly 60-70F. When doing EdWort's Bee Cave Bavarian Hefe weizen (great recipe, btw), I followed his suggestion and pitched and fermented at 68 (using a ferm chamber to maintain temp). I did a 1 L starter instead of the .75L that I think he recommended, but I doubt that made much difference. It turned out great, but I sense a little more banana than clove.

I've only used this yeast once, so my results are anecdotal at best. One question I would have is whether the optimum temp for this strain is style dependent, i.e. would you want to do something differently for the dunkel than for the hefe?

Keep us posted with how the brew turns out!

Wow thanks for all the advice. I am going tojust pitch one smack pack and no starter. To control temps I have a chest freezer with an et 111000 temp controller.

So if I were to startlow and then move higher. How long should I waitbefor raising the temp?

When raising my temps, I try for a degree a day.

I personally love fermenting at room temp for a banana bomb. I'll post up my Banana Weizen recipe in a couple weeks once the beer's ready and i review it.

cool sounds good

one more thing. Since I am only using one smack pack and no starter, I fear that if I have the pitching temp too low it may negatively affect fermentation. does anyone have a recommendation on a specific pitching temp and what I should raise it to and when?

No. You are overthinking it. For a wheat beer, don't worry about making a starter. Just pitch it. The only thing to be slightly worried about is this: Make sure the temp of the smack pack is within 15 degrees of the wort you are putting it into. No, there is no way to specifically measure that either, just use common sense. Don't put an ice cold pack of yeast into hot wort, or vice versa.

So it has been fermenting for about 24 hours now and going strong. I had to put on a blow off tube this afternoon. It is in my chestfreezer with the temp set to 66F. I used an infrarfed thermometer and pointed it at the glass carboy and read 70F. I guess thats ok. My concern is that the freezer compartment smells overwealmingly like sulfer not bannana or clove. I am hoping this is because there is no ventalation in there and it just collects. is this normal?

That's normal in a sealed fermentation chamber. I always start my fermentation at 62 degrees and raise it 3 days later to 68. You have to adjust your fermentation chamber because your beer is going to be a couple to several degrees warmer. Usually 58-60 will hold the fermentation temp to around 62 to begin with. 3068 is an animal and really doesn't need a starter and almost always needs a blow off tube. I've tried to make a starter before with it and it over flowed my flask. Just pop it, let it warm to room temp and pitch it to cooled wort.

The mash schedule also has something to do with the overall flavor profile.

Good luck.

I LOVE 3068 for my Weizenbock. I ferment about 68-70 degrees all the way through. It is delicious, when you pour it it smells like fresh baked banana bread.
When I do my Crop Circle Wheat clone I ferment at 62 degrees for a more cleaner profile.

bniesen said:

I LOVE 3068 for my Weizenbock. I ferment about 68-70 degrees all the way through. It is delicious, when you pour it it smells like fresh baked banana bread.
When I do my Crop Circle Wheat clone I ferment at 62 degrees for a more cleaner profile.

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But 62 is below the recomended range. Is that safe?

I just made a dunkel on saturday with 3068. Pitched at 85 degrees and within an hour had airlock activity and krausen forming. Seems like a fast yeast though. visible activity has ceased since yesterday. (monday)

speedster00 said:

I just made a dunkel on saturday with 3068. Pitched at 85 degrees and within an hour had airlock activity and krausen forming. Seems like a fast yeast though. visible activity has ceased since yesterday. (monday)

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Let us know how it turns out.

This is directly from Gordon Strong describing the tasting they did this year at NHC:


"I like to keep it below 65F. Preferably starting in the upper 50s and letting it rise to 62F or so.

We did a tasting of hefes at the NHC in San Diego that were fermented at different temperatures and mashed differently. The best flavor came from the one fermented cool (62F) and with a single decoction. Harold Gulbransen made them; he's also medaled in this category in the past. He knows what he's doing, especially in this style. So I'm convinced he made all test beers equally well.

I was on the tasting panel, and the difference was fairly clear. A warmer ferment gives a less clean flavor. It still tastes good, but it doesn't taste best. If you can't control your fermentation temps, try brewing it during a different part of the year when the ambient temperature is more suitable. The warmer one had more banana but it also had more of other flavors; the increased esters added an acidity, it seemed, including an apple-like flavor. Without running an analysis on the beer, it's hard to say what all was in there, but I just know what I tasted.

I'm convinced cooler fermentations produce cleaner tasting weizen beers. Don't misinterpret that statement. I can see some people saying, "but I don't want cleaner, I want banana and clove". Meant cleaner relative to that yeast. At cooler temps, you still get banana and clove. You just don't get other things. At higher temps, you do (or more appropriately, you increase the odds that you will).

That said, glad you made it and hope you like it. Warmer temps are not an automatic fail, but if you don't like some of the yeast flavors, I'd try it again with a different fermentation program and see how that works for you. That's been my experience and it seems backed up by others doing their own experiments."

I've made three hefe's using 3068 just recently, not making me an expert by any means. However, my guy at the LHBS advised to stress the yeastto get the banana flavors, so I started it at 80F for the first 4 days of fermentation. Then I let it drop slowly to 65F stepping down 2 degrees a day. Honestly, I do not taste a lot of banana, but there's plenty of clove. Funny, because I heard the opposite is true with high temps and phenols?

II brew Hefes all the time, but I use 380. My experiences is that phenols are not as affected by pitchrate or temperature as the esters (isoamyl acetate/ banana most promiment). The reason I usually get «more» or «less» phenols is du to different mashing and fermentstion regimes which either produce more esters, which mask the phenols more (but the phenols are still there), or less esters which make the phenols stand out more.

An underpitch will give you some more esters, meaning not only banana, the bavarian yeasts are sturdy buggers, so they can handle a good underpitch, but you'll end up with more different esters in general, where some of them can bear signs of an unhealthy fermentation. Almost same as if you do a hermann verfahren mash, more different kinds of esters, without the "stress" though, but watch out not to get the bubblegum which in a traditional german weizen is a flaw.

The cleanest, by cleanest I mean the most balanced between isoamyl acetate and clove, and not much else which stick out much, are the beers fermented from a first gen yeast (not dry yeast) and kept at about 17-18c. You can get very interesting and flavorful hefes if you ferment higher, or even lower, or do a herrmann-mash, but the cleanest I've made are those fermented at the forementioned temperature. No need to underpitch or skip the o2. First gen usually gets you home.

But just to put things a bit in perspective regarding Gordon Strongs comment. The top placements in the german german homebrew competition a few years ago were all fermented at 22-23C as far as I remember. Theres a lot to process if one would dive into the making of bavarian hefeweizens.