Taste your beer during High Krausen

Ok this might be weird but...I mad a blonde ale yesterday, it is my second ever batch and [obviously] I keep looking at it every 2 seconds to see what changed. It is now in high krausen and it is churning like crazy with huge pieces of yeast floating all around and it looks kind of crazy, but the smell from the airlock is so sweet and delicious. Has anybody tasted their beer in the peak of fermentation, come on don't be shy? What would it taste like? Would you feel the little yeasty beasties churning around in your mouth and all the way down? Would it keep fermenting in your stomach until you become a human blow of tube?

Weird question I know but I can't help but wonder as I stare into my carboy...:cross:

Yeah, give it a taste, it's delicious.

Not recommended. I've tasted beer from the blowoff bucket from high krauesen. It tastes super bitter and has a very harsh grain taste. And then the same beer a couple of weeks later tastes perfect.

I've never tried it, but I can assure you that you wouldn't feel the yeasties churning on the way down...though you may swallow a few clumps of the flocculated ones. And I'm fairly certain your stomach acid would kill any poor yeasties that made it down there.

Krausen tastes like ****

lowlife said:

Krausen tastes like ****

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Ha I bet, but I can't tell you how good my closet smells from this beer I'm not sure how I'm going to wait the next 40 days for it to finish, even with some home brew to hold me over. Watching it ferment is awesome so naturally my mind wandered across drinking it, but I wouldn't dare I'm too intimidated by the violence I'm witnessing inside the carboy.

lowlife said:

Krausen tastes like ****

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There's 5 gallons of beer UNDER the krausen.

It tastes like half fermented beer. It should taste good, just a little worty.

Yay! Necrothreading. But according to definition, it is OK to necro a thread if "new content is relevant and something is added to content that is beneficial to the discussion". So no necro flaming.

After I read this thread last night, I brewed some DME, a pinch of yeast nutrient, one or two Palisade pellets, and some Fleischmann's yeast into a erlenmeyer flask and threw it onto a magnetic stirrer. I didn't bothering boiling. Just spooned some DME into some warm water in the flask and let it spin overnight.

This morning, there was a nice foamy head on top of the spinning wort. I pulled it off the stirrer and downed it right there. Results?

- Nice and fizzy.
- Dry-ish. Not too sweet/malty.
- The palisade showed through. Surprising with only 1 or 2 pellets overnight.
- Very yeasty taste.

In short, it was pretty good for an overnight experiment. I'll do it again tonight but with some Wyeast Northwestern (1332) harvested from an earlier brew. I also have a packet of Munton's I may try, just for fun.

So my experiment doesn't replicate an actual Krausen with boil, specially grains, cold break, etc. I'm sure those steps affect the overall result. For example, boiling changes the alpha acids and the protein composition. But for a quick-and-dirty experiment, it was interesting. Perhaps I'll try microwaving the flask tonight and cold-break it in the freezer before pitching the yeast.

My only concern would be a stomach ache from all that suspended yeast. Then to quote the poster above becoming a human blow off tube from the rear...

nDub said:

My only concern would be a stomach ache from all that suspended yeast. Then to quote the poster above becoming a human blow off tube from the rear...

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That's why I chose Fleischmann's. Some guys just eat it. Or Vegemite ... I can't explain that ...

Brewer's yeast is different than Fleischmann's (obviously) but I'll find out. How many Weizens have you stirred up the sentiment before drinking? I've drank my share of yeast over the years, my stomach knows how to deal with it.

moors said:

That's why I chose Fleischmann's...

Brewer's yeast is different than Fleischmann's (obviously) but I'll find out. How many Weizens have you stirred up the sentiment before drinking? I've drank my share of yeast over the years, my stomach knows how to deal with it.

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Its not so much the yeast, I think, as the density of the yeast. At high krausen I imagine it will be fairly high.

I too have drank (drunk) my fair share of brewers yeast will little effect. On the other hand the champange yeast I use in my ciders and meads do give me a stomach ache and terrible gas.

check this out: apparently-you-can-make-beer-in-your-gut

So I cracked open a Florastor (saccharomyces boulardii) and dumped it into the flask with unboiled DME and a pinch of nutrient. These are "healthy" probiotics, right? No gut problems, no sir! It ran all day (about 14 hours). I wasn't going to let unboiled and unsanitized wort go for any longer, so I pulled it off tonight. The Florastor yeast was barely active.

Either my Florastor was dormant or it takes longer to get started. This guy actually brews his beer with the stuff.

Maybe tomorrow I'll make a sanitized and boiled 1L batch, toss in some hop pellets, pitch some Florastor, give it a few days, and let 'er rip. Pun intended.