harvesting yeast from German hefeweizen

I would like to harvest the yeast from bottles of commercial hefeweizen to try making my own hefe with these strains of yeast. I have a bottle of a German brewery Schofferhofer. Has anyone had success harvesting the yeast from a hefeweizen, and specifically from the Schofferhofer brewery?

Most of them are bottled with lager yeast.

This site is horribly out of date, but there is a list of possible bottle harvesting yeasts here.

It says that you can harvest from Schofferhofer hefeweizen, but its not sure if it is the primary yeast strain or not. Mentions that it is estery and phenolic, but the mention of diacetyl could mean its a lager bottle-conditioning strain. I guess you won't know until you give it a shot!

erikpete18 said:

This site is horribly out of date, but there is a list of possible bottle harvesting yeasts here.

It says that you can harvest from Schofferhofer hefeweizen, but its not sure if it is the primary yeast strain or not. Mentions that it is estery and phenolic, but the mention of diacetyl could mean its a lager bottle-conditioning strain. I guess you won't know until you give it a shot!

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Hey thanks for this link. Very useful info there. I tried to make a starter from the dregs of the Schofferhofer bottle. I started with a small starter and built it up to 1 liter. It never really took off though and did not develop much of a krauesen and certainly did not smell like a german hefe. In the end I decided the experiment was a failure and dumped the starter. I did not want to chance it and ruin a 5 gallon batch along with 3 kg of dried wheat extract. It certainly looks like there is yeast in a bottle of Schofferhofer but they might not be the primary fermentation yeast as my starter had no odor at all.

Thanks for your input