Newbie Bottle Harvesting question

[FatDragon]

I'm currently in the Research and Acquisition phase of my foray into home brewing. Being in China, ingredients are scarce and come from sources I can't verify. I brought back a number of beers from the States this summer, however, so I'm wondering if any of them would be bottle-harvestable and work towards making a quality beer.

The offenders:
3x Oaked Arrogant Bastard and 2x Ruination Ale from Stone.
2x Bigfoot and 3x Hoptimum from Sierra Nevada.
3x G'Knight and 3x The Gub'na (both canned) from Oskar Blues.
and
1x Stony Brook Red (corked 750mL) from Sam Adams.

There's also a decent selection of Belgian and German beer available in China if you know where to look, so I could get Chimay, Duvel, Maredsous, Paulaner, Erdinger, Mönschhof, Trappistes Rochefort, Gouden Carolus, and others I'm sure. I suspect a number of the Europeans would be bottle-harvestable, but the yeast strains they offer might be a little much for a first attempt.

The two alternatives are ordering some Safale US-05 within China and crossing my fingers that it's the real thing and viable, or ordering from the US, sucking up the shipping cost and time, and crossing my fingers that customs doesn't pinch beer ingredients because they're organic in nature and technically restricted from unlicensed import.

 

[stpug]

You can definitely harvest yeast from many of the beers you mentioned. Of the "offenders" you currently have, they are probably not the best examples to harvest from but that's not to say you can't do it. The biggest problem with them is how alcoholic they are = low viability and potentially mutated/stressed yeast. The lightest of the bunch is oaked arrogant bastard but I'd worry about the time it spent on oak and viability of the yeast.

You can harvest from lighter weight stone beers, sierra nevada beers, oskar maybe, and sam adams if unfiltered.

Have a look through these links to get a better idea of what you might find:
http://www.nada.kth.se/~alun/Beer/Bottle-Yeasts/
http://www.mrmalty.com/yeast.htm
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f163/commercial-beer-yeast-harvest-list-262713/

 

[FatDragon]

Okay, so bottle harvesting is best done with lower ABV beers. That's good to know. It's also encouraging to know that far more beers than I would have expected can be bottle harvested. I was worried that I would be limited to commercial beers that had a visible and notable yeast slurry at the bottom of the bottle, which I haven't observed in any of these guys. Those yeast lists are also pretty nice as well, though it'll take a while and at least several batches before I really know what to make of most of that information.

Since I asked this question, it has been my good fortune to discover a guy here on the forum who runs a homebrew shop in Shanghai, so hopefully I won't need to worry about bottle harvesting until I decide I specifically want to do so. Without intending to denigrate Chinese merchants in general, it can be hard to vouch for the provenance of imported goods in China, especially stuff like homebrew ingredients that probably they probably buy in bulk and which probably don't exactly fly off their shelves. It's comforting to know that I have a source who is himself a home brewer. Hobbyists who supply to their fellows tend to do them right in terms of providing quality advice and quality products. Now I just have to wait until he gets back in country. Two more weeks...