krausening

Has anybody ever used krausen rather than corn sugar to bottle condition your brews? I like the idea of not introducing any "new" sugar into the recipe, and using just what has been made available through the brewing process. How do I figure out how much to use to condition 5 gal? Obviously don't want to use too much.

Where did you hear of this. I have heard of harvesting yeast out of krausen but not sugar to bottle with. Is this even possible?

Someone more experienced than me may chime in (Calling Kaiser.. Dr. Kaiser to the homebrew forum please), but I believe that krausening involves using currently fermenting beer to beer that you're ready to bottle in lieu of priming sugar or DME.

Yup, I found this handy dandy link on the intergoogle:

http://***********/departments/1550.html

I believe what the OP is referring to is Kraeusening. A method of using an amount of unfermented wort to prime beer. I haven't done it but I it has been talked about on some threads.

The issue is that you have to know the OG of the wort before you can figure the amount to use for priming. There is a formula in Papazian's book using an example of 1.040 OG needing 1 1/2 quarts of wort. Unfortunately, I don't know how to type out the formula in math speak that would make sense. Any math geeks with the book hanging around?

Yes, I used this almost exclusively for bottle conditioning. It's great when you can bulk condition the beer longer and still get full carbonation in a week:

This explains how to do it: Kraeusening
This explains how to calculate the amount of Kraeusen: Calculating Priming Sugars (But don't worry about all the formulas unless you are interested in this. There is a spreadsheet that does that for you)

The BYO article is good, but it doesn't tell you how to calculate the amount needed for bottle conditioning.

Kai

Here is a very lengthy thread that resulted from some questions I had about kraeusening a California Common I did a while back. Believe me, I asked just about every question you possibly can about the subject and got each one answered. A good resource to be sure.

Btw, the technique works great. The only thing is, like Kai said, to be careful about how much you use. That can be a fuzzy line - and if you aren't careful, your volumes of CO2 can be out of style and even give you the occasional beer geyser.

That's what I'm afraid of.

beerme70 said:

That's what I'm afraid of.

Click to expand...

That's why I finally did the math and wrote the spreadsheet. Another thing to consider, which came up on the NB forum on a similar subject is, that the fermentation may seem to be over, but there might be sugars left in the beer that might be fermented by the freshly added yeast (because it is healthier). This can be accounted for by doing a fast ferment test and knowing the limit of the FG, but I only think that this is a problem with high gravity beers or poor fermentation (low pitching rate, inadequate oxygen). For now, simply making Kraeusen, taking its gravity before priming and using the spread sheet to figure out the amount needed and any additional sugar additions, should be enough to worry about.

Kai