Anyone succesfully brewed from hoegarden harvested yeast?

[Andy_LV]

Umm.. basically, the subject.

There have been tons of rumors and whispers around, probably on this forum as well about infamous hoegaarden yeast - some claim brewers use different strain for bottling (that would be expensive procedure wouldnt it?) while some claim its a BS put up by commercial breweries to discourage people from harvesting yeast from bottles.

so, just curious - anyone have done it and had a decent results with hoegaarden bottle yeast?

is there a list of yeasts from commercially brewed wheat beers that could be harvested?

thanks in advance and soz if I waked some sleeping dog

 

[Nateo]

Using different yeast to bottle isn't that unusual. But, I think a bigger issue is that Hoegaarden pasteurizes their bottles before shipping them out, AFAIK.

 

[DrinksWellWithOthers]

According to Jamil's Mr Malty site, Wyeast 3944 and WLP400 are the Hoegaarden strain.

 

[musick]

Ive harvested many a commercial yeast, but not Hoegarden.

BTW: Your city is the beauty of the Baltics.. I was happy to spend a week there.

 

[jerkstore]

In the process of a Wit w/ harvested Hoegaarden yeast. Just pitched yesterday. 1- Started w/ dregs of 5 bottles, + 50 ml H2O + 50g dme left 2 days on my stirplate.
2 - decanted, stepped it up to 70ml-70g 1day on the stir plate ,
3- decanted, stepped it up to 100ml-100g, 1 day on the stir plate, and the krausen knocked the top off my flask.

So Hoegaarden yeast seems very viable to the doubters.

 

[Revvy]

Yes I've harvested and used hoegaarden yeast all the time. I've posted repeatedly about my experiences with it.

This gets posted at least once a week on here as an example of why even wathcing krausen is not a good way to determine if a beer is finished.

I had a wit beer that I pitched bottle harvested Hoegaarden yeast on Dec. 26th, that STILL had a 2" krausen on it three weeks later. I took a grav reading and it had reached terminal gravity, 1.010. So the beer was done, but the krausen still lingered. I finally gently swirled the beer to knock it down, and let it settle for another week before I bottled it. I'm not normally a fan of knocking them down, and usually let it do it naturally.

But some yeasts are low flocculating, and may have a difficult time. I figured since mine was bottle harvested, and I had pitched the starter at high krausen, maybe it was "genetically mutated" with the flocculation "gene" off or something. So I gently swirled it and let it fall.

I brewed another batch with another mason jars worth of that yeast several months later and had the same thing happen.

Beligan wits are notoriously long krausening.

It's fine, just confirm with multiple hydro readings.

When I'm bottle Harvesting, I try to get as many bottles as possible. When I capture hoegaarden yeast I used 12 bottles of the beer. Obviously I couldn't drink that in a day. SO I recapped the bottles with sanitized caps and stuck them in the fridge, it took about 10 days to get the harvest together.

And it turned out fine. Just be sure to sanitize the bottle area and cap before you re-open them.

Also I tended to leave behind more beer in the bottles than if I were just harvesting on drinking day, I left a good inch of beer behind to protect the yeast while waiting to harvest them.

I've never heard or seen those so-called rumors about it. Hoesgaarden yeast is hoegaarden yeast in the bottles. AND Most of those 'rumors" about which yeast is in or not are BS anyway. It is really very very very rare that a brewery will actually "disquise" their fermenting yeast. Mostly a few Belgian breweries, but not most typical breweries. The only other ones that might are doing it becasue it was a high grav fermentation and so they used something like a champagne yeast at bottling. Or they filtered and then added fresh yeast.

But really, it's very rare....it's better to assume the yeast in your typical beer that you want to harvest REALLY IS the yeast in question, rather than some vast conspiracy to hide yeast/

You can use this listing as a reference, but it's not up to date Yeast from commercial beers.

But honestly most of the time the yeast in there, is the yeast we want, and it's really not too hard to confirm it, there's usually enough folks who've already been using it to do a google search to confirm it. Usually I'll do something like "Bottle Harvesting bell's amber ale" on google and it will tell me enough to know that folks have done it.

But I don't know where you've read anything contrary about hoegaarden, iirc my reading was that it was one of the most harvested out there.