Harvesting Tripel Karmeliet - smell of apples

[mChavez]

Hi all!

I found a bottle of Tripel Karmeliet in a local shop and decided to try stealing the yeasties from the bottle sediment.
I brewed a 200ml starter with 20 gr of DME and pitched the sediment into it.
24 hours later the starter appears to have fermented, however, instead of the usual smell of yeasty beer, it smells VERY strongly of green apples! Pure green apples and nothing else.

I practice good sanitation and have not had any contamination issues so far.

So, has anyone harvested Tripel Karmeliet yeast? If you have, did it smell of green apples?

I've stepped up the starter tonight and I'm quite interested to taste the result but I've got a feeling that I failed to collect the yeast =(

 

[Hex23]

Taste would be the better indicator than smell, but remember starters aren't supposed to result in something that smells and tastes like good beer. Especially if its stirred, the extra oxygen would probably lead to acetaldehyde (green apples). I have occasionally tasted my starters and they often do have a strong estery or green apple flavor. One of my harvested starters (Pacman from Deadguy) took quite some time to start fermenting - like 72 hours. I'd count it a good sign that your started within 24. I've never had a starter go bad that that I was willing to taste. I did have a failed harvest of Rochefort once, but I never saw signs of anything, and it smelled pretty bad, so I decided to just dump it.

It's funny you're harvesting Karmeliet Tripel. That's the next thing I intend to clone and for whatever reason it never occurred to me to harvest. I have a 750 of it in my basement.

 

[mChavez]

Thanks Hex.

I've stepped up to 1.7l and there is a krausen ring on the flask this morning so it looks like it fermented well.
The apple smell is now a lot weaker - must have been the high oxygen content in the small starter as you said.

I can't say I liked the karmeliet beer that much - it was too sweet for my liking, but I did enjoy the fruity character. I'm hoping to try brewing a saison with it.

 

[Hex23]

I can't say I liked the karmeliet beer that much - it was too sweet for my liking, but I did enjoy the fruity character. I'm hoping to try brewing a saison with it.

I had it for the first time at a restaurant in Sheboygan. I was stunned at how easy drinking it was for such high ABV - really light bodied and not harsh at all. Yes it is definitely on the sweeter side of things. But, I tend to like my beer a little sweeter. I've definitely had beers that were over the top. I had something from Avery (double O-fest?) and it was so cloying I could not even get through half of it.

 

[mChavez]

Well, yeast is now harvested and frozen. Looking at how well-carbed the starter was I suspect that there might have been a lot of conditioning yeast in the original bottle