Float Tank usage

[cactusgarrett]

Saw this on reddit and I thought I'd pose the question here. I'm genuinely curious but no one with experience is chiming in to that post:

"I've been poring over all things German lager lately, and info from Bierstadt in this article has me curious:

If you'd like to mimic Bierstadt's use of a float tank, knockout into a fermenter, pitch your yeast and then 12 hours later transfer your beer into a new fermentation vessel, leaving behind about 1c of wort from the bottom. This helps clarify the beer and leave some of the weaker yeast behind.

This is the first I've heard of mimicking a Float Tank on the homebrew level, so I dug deeper. According to this article, the traditional use is to bubble up air through the new wort:

As the flotation air is dispersed in the wort...[it] forms small bubbles in the wort, to which cold-trub particles cling. As the bubbles float to the surface, they drag the attached trub particles with them. At the top of the wort, the bubbles coalesce into a brown, firm, and compact layer of foam. As time passes, this head of foam may even dry out and become crusty. Once the beer starts fermenting, however, the liquid is racked out from under the trub-laden foam head, leaving the unwanted sediment behind. If the flotation tank is open, the foam layer may also be carefully skimmed off by hand.

I've been a staunch opponent of unnecessarily using secondary vessels, but with the above in mind, the process info from Ashleigh Carter appears too vague in order to achieve the goal of mimicking a float tank. She says to "transfer your beer into a new fermentation vessel", but it doesn't say how. For example, I've got a SS Brewbucket with a ball valve toward to bottom of the cone. Would it suffice to just dump the trub that has accumulated at the cone after 12 hours? Or is the idea to separate the beer from the foam at the top - as the Beer & Brewing article suggests? They even suggest skimming."

 

[day_trippr]

The LODO guys would have meltdown over this