champagne yeast in primary, how long to wait?

[Hopper5000]

Hey All,

I used some champagne yeast to finish out a beer I had in primary (long story not worth getting in to). I know with beer yeast it's good to leave it in primary for a bit (few weeks) so it can clean up by products and finish fermenting everything. I was curious if this was also necessary with champagne yeast as I haven't really used it before. Thanks

 

[zzzzzzzzz]

When it stops bubbling give it a day or two or raise the temp a little and you should have a VERY dry beer, with almost all of the sugars fermented to alcohol. In my Humble opinion. I used to brew wine and the raising temp really added some nice esters. Control and record it as you may end up with a really wonderful/different winner of a beer.

 

[GuldTuborg]

Wait to do what? Once the gravity is stable, you can rack it, if that's what you planned to do. If you mean to bottle straight away, then you can probably do that as well once you have had a stable gravity for a few days. Of course, the gravity might not change at all from what it was before the champagne yeast. Again, let gravity be your guide.

 

[Hopper5000]

Thanks for the replies. I keg so I was just trying to get a sense of when I should do that.

Basically what happened is I made a super strong beer (16.2%). It was way too sweet because it didn't fully ferment all of the corn sugar I put in there so I pulled half of it out and diluted it by half to make a 8ish% beer. I then pitched some champagne yeast in there (last Saturday) to ferment all of the rest of the corn sugar so it's not cloyingly sweet. It seems to be done fermenting now. I actually pitched it on top of a yeast cake of wlp80 cream ale, but didn't see any activity so I put the champagne in there since it's more alcohol tolerant. It fermented at about 66-68F.

If I was using beer yeast I would probably leave it sitting in primary for another week or two just to let it clean up the by products. I haven't used champagne yeast in this manner before so I was just wondering if you needed to give it the same amount of clean up time.

As for stable gravities, I make starters and pitch plenty of yeast based on the calculators so I usually take a reading and if it's within the yeast attenuation range I call it good. With this one I pitched 2 packets rehydrated into 5 gal.