Harvesting yeast from Berlinerweisse

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So, I'm bottling up my first Berlinerweisse today. I was wondering what you all thought about harvesting the yeast from a beer like this.

I did a sour mash, a short boil, and then pitched Wyeast 1272 American Ale II. So, I shouldn't have to worry about harvesting any lacto bugs along with the yeast, right? The only thing I can think of that might be a concern is whether or not the acidic environment has stressed the yeast beyond the point of being worth harvesting.

If I do harvest the yeast, should I stick to using it for future sours? Or would you think it would be alright to use it in clean beers?

This is new territory for me (the sour thing), so I'm not quite sure.

 

[kingwood-kid]

If you boiled, the lacto should be dead. As you said, the acidity is not great for the yeast. I think you'd be okay to harvest, although you'd want to make a starter both to get the yeast fresh/healthy and to sample to see if it has an infected pH of 3.

 

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Well, I ended up not harvesting the yeast.

The main reason was that I wasn't going to have time to deal with that added process after I finally finished bottling.

The other reason was that there just didn't seem to be all that much yeast. There was no noticeable trub other than the flocced yeast, but it just didn't look like much yeast. My thought process was that maybe the acidity of the beer effected the growth of the yeast and stressed it more than I might have expected.

So, that plus the lack of time to finish it all up meant that I just decided to pass on this one.

Thanks for the comment, kingwood.

 

[kingwood-kid]

Once the lacto was done, you may not have had enough sugar to really stimulate much yeast growth. I made a Berliner the same way you did. The lacto and whatever else was on the grain dropped my gravity from 1.034 to 1.004. After I pasteurized, I decided champagne yeast would be able to handle the acidity and make bubbles.