Harvested starters

I really like the idea of harvesting yeast from bottle conditioned beers when trying to reproduce a style. Yesterday we pitched a Paulaner Hefe harvested starter in with a vial of WL Hefe strain. Do any of you regularly harvest yeast as opposed to purchasing? I guess I feel like if I'm going to go through the trouble of making a starter, I might as well harvest.

Found this on another forum posted by Zapp Branigan:

"Be careful, the vast majority of hefeweizens are filtered and then reprimed with a non-primary strainn for bottling. A lager yeast is normally used. The only weizen I know for sure that uses the primary strain (apart from Echter, which I was unaware of until now, cheers 6470zzy) is Schneiderweisse. The yeast in a Paulaner/Erdinger will not be the primary strain sadly. I'm not sure about Edelweiss."

This site isn't totally clear, but seemed to indicate Paulaner was harvestable. http://www.nada.kth.se/~alun/Beer/Bottle-Yeasts/

The good news is I'll be able to let you know how it turns out. The bad news is if it turns out good, I won't know if it is because of the harvested Paulaner or the WL.

RGillette10 said:

I really like the idea of harvesting yeast from bottle conditioned beers when trying to reproduce a style. Yesterday we pitched a Paulaner Hefe harvested starter in with a vial of WL Hefe strain. Do any of you regularly harvest yeast as opposed to purchasing? I guess I feel like if I'm going to go through the trouble of making a starter, I might as well harvest.

Click to expand...

People do this all of the time. If you do a search on this forum, there are lists of brands that can be harvested. I'm going to be doing it with one of my own homebrews soon, since I don't have anymore of that yeast strain...

You have conflicting things going on here.

Harvesting yeast from commercially bottled beers can save you from having to buy yeast. But, what is the sense in doing that, if you're adding a White Labs yeast.

As already stated, you need to know whether the yeast in the bottle is the fermenting yeast, or if it is priming yeast.

Yeah, we weren't sure that the WL vial or the starter was going to be sufficient on its own. Figured it would be better to overpitch than underpitch.