Conan Yeast Experiences

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bbatter35 said:
Been subbed to the thread for a bit and have to post my Conan experience: (bear w me, dont know how to post recipes yet)

on 8/16 brewed a 5 gal dipa ag w a 10lb Maris otter base, 1lb each wheat malt, Vienna & carapils. 1oz columbus fwh, 1oz chinook 15 min, 1oz citra at 5, 1oz simcoe at fo & 1oz simcoe steeped at 170 for 20 min whirlpool. Added 4 oz turbinado & 10oz orange blossom honey at 5 min. OG was 1.073

Pitched Conan that I harvested from two heady cans on 7/3, started the day before with 200ml 1.020 starter & BAZINGA it went off! Fermed a little hot @ 72 (don't have a ferm chamber yet, santa swmbo knows :rockin:) but still had fruity smells seeping from the airlock.

Racked it last week at 16 days in primary (As said many times in the thread it does not like to floc!) SG was 1.014 & tasted amazing! :drunk: Had the balance of bitterness with solid malt body without being cloying. Eminently drinkable, flat no less! Swmbo has mooched a gallon in the past few days. Dry hopped on Sunday the 1st with 1oz simcoe & .5 oz citra from a Belgian pale ale I brewed that day. Ill bottle it this weekend, if swmbo doesn't bogart it all while I'm out!

Randomly, Netflix recommended Conan the destroyer to us (me), and after averting my eyes from grace jones we decided to name the beer CROM.

Best part, I washed the yeast after racking and now have 3 pints of conan in mason jars to use! It will be hoppy, so ill just adjust the hop sked on the next brew. Anyone use Conan in a stout? I'm intrigued by the fruity flavor in a chocolate stout. :tank:
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Funny, I made an IPA with Conan that I named Crom. You can find it on Untappd. Here's the label I had designed..

Crom Label.png
 
bbatter35 said:
Pitched Conan that I harvested from two heady cans on 7/3, started the day before with 200ml 1.020 starter & BAZINGA it went off! Fermed a little hot @ 72 (don't have a ferm chamber yet, santa swmbo knows :rockin:) but still had fruity smells seeping from the airlock.
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wow... that seems to defy logic. if we take the generous estimate of there being 1.5 billion cells per can (i suspect it's closer to half that amount, but let's go big for now), in a 200 ml starter you would have had 16 billion cells (per yeastcalc.com).

both yeastcalc and mrmalty agree that 251 billion cells is the optimal pitch for 5 gallons of 1.073.

so, if all of the above is correct, you pitched about 6% of the needed cells. i find it hard to believe that those cells could have grown sufficiently to get the job done. did you aerate a lot? use a lot of nutrients? enquiring minds want to know!
 
Stauffbier: LOVE the label. Great minds think alike. :mug:

Sweetcell: Truth be told, I'm not entirely scientific about cell count. But I did forget to say that at harvest I stepped the dregs up with a 200ml starter, then cold crashed. There was maybe 3/8" of sediment in the jar-o.

A day before brewday I let the jar come to room temp, decanted, swirled to get the barbarian in suspension then added the 200ml of 1.020. I aerated the wort from the bk into the primary (the splash method-I'm not cool enough to have a stone that farts oxygen). No nutrients added, just mashed at 148 & figured if the dog wouldn't hunt, I'd bring in the 04.

Can't speak for the calculators, but mine own eyes did see the glory of the maltose enemy being driven before me. There wasn't any lamentation of the women though. I'll have to add that to the grainbill next time...:D
 
I've brewed a couple stouts and porters with conan. They come out very belgian with quite a bit of contrasting fruit flavors, be warned.
This yeast will completely change the profile of these beers.
 
Petekiteworld said:
I've brewed a couple stouts and porters with conan. They come out very belgian with quite a bit of contrasting fruit flavors, be warned.
This yeast will completely change the profile of these beers.
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Ditto. Have a cherry stout going right now. It's...interesting. Verdict is still out on awesome good or awesome weird.
 
I'm done messing with Conan. It works early, and then turns belgian clove. Will ruin a beer if you didn't intend to brew a belgian DIPA with american grains and hops.
 
FATC1TY said:
I'm done messing with Conan. It works early, and then turns belgian clove. Will ruin a beer if you didn't intend to brew a belgian DIPA with american grains and hops.
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What generation did you notice the shift at?
 
Sub'ed. I've got some conan on it's way in a few days!

So, I've read through about half the posts on this thread, and it seems like lots of people are doing APA, IPA, DIPA, etc with conan. I've got 2 IPA's in the queue, plus, now that it's moving into fall I want to brew some darker beers.

Has anyone used Conan in stouts, porters, etc? How'd it turn out?

Also, from what I was picking up, it sounds like a medium attenuator, maybe like a Denny's 50? And low flocculation. Is there any sort of consensus on it's attenuation?
 
tgmartin000 said:
Also, from what I was picking up, it sounds like a medium attenuator, maybe like a Denny's 50? And low flocculation. Is there any sort of consensus on it's attenuation?
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Not sure where you heard of medium attenuation. From the hundreds of posts I've seen it's among the most attenuating of any brewing strain; 80-85% depending on generation.
 
Yeast Geek has a Green Mountains Ale that they usually release on Mondays around 3pm. Check their Facebook or Twitter for the announcement.

Otherwise there are a number of us that make slants. I good place to start looking for slants is in the trade forums.
 
Anyone have issues with Conan crapping out early? OG of 1.050 now down to 1.032 after 10 days. Used it in 10 gallons of a fresh hop IPA with Cascade and Chinook. The batch literally tastes like pineapple juice. No citrus whatsoever. I fermented at 68 the entire time. Just upped it to 72 to see if I can get some more activity out of it before I pitch some US-05.
 
sbuchan said:
Anyone have issues with Conan crapping out early? OG of 1.050 now down to 1.032 after 10 days. Used it in 10 gallons of a fresh hop IPA with Cascade and Chinook. The batch literally tastes like pineapple juice. No citrus whatsoever. I fermented at 68 the entire time. Just upped it to 72 to see if I can get some more activity out of it before I pitch some US-05.
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Yes. I had a 1.070 DIPA crap out at 1.024 using ECY-29. I pay close attention to pitch rate and oxygenation, so not sure what happened. I had to resort to S-05 to get it down to acceptable levels.
 
I had been wondering if anyone else had any experience with the ECY 29 version. I brewed up a 1.071 Rye DIPA mashed around 148, which had 1lb of honey and 1/4lb of dextrose, and pitched an active starter of ECY 29. Krausen was forming within 10 hours, peaked the next day and had mostly dropped by day 4. On day 6 I was at 63% (1.026). Bumped from 68 to 72 at that point. As of last night (day 10) was at 73% (1.019). It's still working but very slowly. With all those adjunct sugars I was expecting a much quicker ferment.
 
I'm getting around 75-80 apparent at normal 66- 68 degree temps with pure 02 and solid pitch rates.
 
I'm starting to wonder if my harvested Conan IS actually Conan after reading the article in the newest BYO magazine. It says the Alchemist is no longer using that strain..
 
I'm planning on brewing a wheat wine and using either Pacman or Conan. Anyone brew a similar beer with Conan? Thoughts on how it might work out? Thanks!
 
I think the author may have misunderstood. Thw brewer may have meant that the strain has mutated from its original form when it belonged to Noonan. I harvested some about a month ago and it had that huge peach/orange aroma.
 
First time with Conan was a small (3½ gallon) batch of low gravity for the purpose of growing enough for a bigger beer. The vial came from Princeton Homebrew, but I got it from a friend who had and extra that he hadn’t used in a while. I hindsight, should have made a starter. Started slow (3 full days) and didn’t attenuate as well as hoped, little less than 70%. Still made beer with no real flaws except for not clearing. Gave it another shot this weekend. After the last experience, was really nervous, but had airlock pressure by morning and full krausen in 24 hours.

My only complaint is the cloudiness. First batch didn’t clear even after an extended cold crash (but I did forget the Irish Moss.) This one is also starting out murky. Can’t even see the activity. I’ve read that this is a low flocculent yeast. Is there any hope for a clear beer or do we just live with it?

Conan 1.jpg
 
The first time I used harvested Conan a year ago, the beer I made never cleared. It stayed cloudy even with cold conditioning. The second batch of Conan which I harvested about 4 months ago flocs out super clear after about 10 days in the fridge. This is one reason why I'm thinking there might be some truth to the possibility that they are no longer using Conan at Alchemist.
 
I have 2 all-grain batches running with the YG-001(Yeast Geek) which is the Conan Strain and its fermenting nicely.
My first is a heady clone, the second is a pumpkin ale batch that I am experimenting with that I also dumped a pound of Sourwood Honey into to see if the yeast will throw that peachy/orangy taste into it or if its more or less the hop schedule of the Heady ingredients that is doing more of the "smell" magic you get from Heady.

I can say that popping the yeast vial open, I did smell a whiff of the peachy/orangy smell from the yeast tube which I was excited about.

Both beers, the heady clone(v4 clone grain bill) and the pumpkin ale(I used the same grain bill for this one as smashing pumpkin ale recipe beefed up the 2 row by a lb along with some other additions) started at 1.075 OG so I will report back once they reach FG on how well it worked out as well as taste. they are both trucking along fermentation-wise at 66-68 Deg.
I expect the Heady to be a good brew, the pumpkin ale is a coin-toss at this point as I bastardized the recipe to see how good or bad my own recipe would be by using this yeast instead of an english strain, adding an additional ounce of cluster hops to the original recipe and adding that pound of sourwood honey at flameout.


:rockin::mug:
 
tagz said:
I think the author may have misunderstood. Thw brewer may have meant that the strain has mutated from its original form when it belonged to Noonan. I harvested some about a month ago and it had that huge peach/orange aroma.
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AFAIK ECY29 as well as the Yeast Geek strain are harvested from HT - so whether or not it's called Conan or Dave the strains will still be what is currently used in HT
 
terrapinj said:
AFAIK ECY29 as well as the Yeast Geek strain are harvested from HT - so whether or not it's called Conan or Dave the strains will still be what is currently used in HT
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I wonder if they are/have been stepping up an older generation of Conan from HT, or the "supposed" newer strain from HT.
:confused:
 
I recently received an East Coast Yeast ECY29 strain, aka Conan. Unfortunately USPS delayed my shipment and it was in route for 5 days instead of 2. I immediately set up a yeast starter to ensure my best chances at viability and propagating the most possible cells. The yeast container was not warm to the touch when I opened the package, but not what I would consider cool either. When I opened it to put it in the starter I was overwhelmed with sulfur, which was a bit of a shock.

So for those of you who've used this strain, is that something I should be concerned about? Is my yeast a goner at this point? Or should I not worry about that sulfur smell since this is just propagation at 70 degrees and not the same temperature I'll be fermenting at which will be 64 degrees.
 
geoffey said:
I recently received an East Coast Yeast ECY29 strain, aka Conan. Unfortunately USPS delayed my shipment and it was in route for 5 days instead of 2. I immediately set up a yeast starter to ensure my best chances at viability and propagating the most possible cells. The yeast container was not warm to the touch when I opened the package, but not what I would consider cool either. When I opened it to put it in the starter I was overwhelmed with sulfur, which was a bit of a shock.

So for those of you who've used this strain, is that something I should be concerned about? Is my yeast a goner at this point? Or should I not worry about that sulfur smell since this is just propagation at 70 degrees and not the same temperature I'll be fermenting at which will be 64 degrees.
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Taste the liquid from your starter before the next step up. Ensure there aren't any noticeable off flavors.
 
Nightmare happened. My double batch of DIPA was in the fermentation chest and the fridge wasn't plugged in. Just the heat of these in an enclosed area got it up to ~83, I just noticed and it has been almost 2 full days. Beyond bummed. Should I just dump it? It was a big investment in terms of hops, but even more if I go through with the double dry hopping schedule.
Never happened to me before, and of course of my most involved beer ever!
 
LateraLex said:
Nightmare happened. My double batch of DIPA was in the fermentation chest and the fridge wasn't plugged in. Just the heat of these in an enclosed area got it up to ~83, I just noticed and it has been almost 2 full days. Beyond bummed. Should I just dump it? It was a big investment in terms of hops, but even more if I go through with the double dry hopping schedule.
Never happened to me before, and of course of my most involved beer ever!
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I would recommend never dumping a batch without seeing it thru to the bottle. At least in situations regarding fermentation temps. I say bottle it, and see how it tastes. If it doesn't taste good, then you can consider dumping. Just my thoughts....
 
Stauffbier said:
I would recommend never dumping a batch without seeing it thru to the bottle. At least in situations regarding fermentation temps. I say bottle it, and see how it tastes. If it doesn't taste good, then you can consider dumping. Just my thoughts....
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Would you change your mind if each 5 gallon batch needed another 7oz of dry hop? :) I take your point though, I think I should let it ride and see what happens.
 
geoffey said:
I recently received an East Coast Yeast ECY29 strain, aka Conan. Unfortunately USPS delayed my shipment and it was in route for 5 days instead of 2. I immediately set up a yeast starter to ensure my best chances at viability and propagating the most possible cells. The yeast container was not warm to the touch when I opened the package, but not what I would consider cool either. When I opened it to put it in the starter I was overwhelmed with sulfur, which was a bit of a shock.

So for those of you who've used this strain, is that something I should be concerned about? Is my yeast a goner at this point? Or should I not worry about that sulfur smell since this is just propagation at 70 degrees and not the same temperature I'll be fermenting at which will be 64 degrees.
Click to expand...

I believe when I first stepped up my conan from the cans I had a sulfur smell. I probably started off with too big of a starter though. I wonder if it is just the smell produced if stressed. Once I dumped out the liquid and added some fresh wort it then had all the peachy aromas that it is known form. I've brewed two good beers from that culture.

So maybe try stepping it up again is my advice.
 

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