Harvesting Erdinger Yeast: Disaster?

[lieb2101]

So, I love Erdinger Dunkel. I purchased their normal wiessbrau and harvested the yeast from the bottle. A week later now and the starter looks great, smell great, but... the yeast never rose to the top like an ale yeast should. Now I read in a lonely email thread I googled that most German wheat brewers filter their weissen yeast out and just user regular lager yeast to bottle condition.
I was planning on brewing a dunkel tomorrow with this yeast but now I'm not so sure... I just tasted the starter and it certainly tasted like a heffe, but a little more prominent flavor than the original. But I don't know if the flavors I'm tasting are from the original beer that I used to make the starter... Not sure what to do here... go buy real heffe yeast or gamble with this batch???

Any suggestions?

 

[magnj]

The yeast will not rise to the top, it will settle out and form a cake at the bottom. If it smells good that means you have yeast doing their thing and you are in good shape.

 

[lieb2101]

Update:
The Erdinger yeast I harvested from the bottle was certainly an ale yeast. It ended up creating a HUGE cake on top was very active at 68F.

While it didn't produce too much in the way of hefe flavor, it did create significant carbonation. This leads me to believe that this was indeed a bottle conditioning strain of yeast. The interesting feature was the nature of the carbonation. It seems that the bubbles are almost suspended in that they don't foam up with pressure release but only with agitation. And it has that almost champagne like head that Erdinger is known for.

I ended up mixing this with a US Hefe yeast and it turned out amazing. It seems like the yeasts have worked together well. I had a bunch of honey in my recipe and it's still a bit sweet but I've racked it to the keg now. I'm going to give it a few more weeks to dry out.

I also made some slants of the yeast combo so we'll see if I can re-use this dynamic duo for some other creations.

Cheers!

 

[michael.berta]

Update:
The Erdinger yeast I harvested from the bottle was certainly an ale yeast. It ended up creating a HUGE cake on top was very active at 68F.

What do you think it's an ale strain again? A lager yeast will still ferment at 68 degrees. It would just produce a beer that didn't taste all that great...

 

[lieb2101]

Well, my reasons for it being an ale are :
1) Fermented violently @ 68f without tasting like butt and had some hefe qualities.
2) Created a huge krasuen cake on top (although I guess this isn't specific to ales?).
3) Attenuated from 1.045 to about 1.013 in less than 1 week.

You think this could still be a lager conditioning yeast? Why?
I could always be wrong... in fact, I usually am

 

[michael.berta]

I don't know. A lager yeast will still ferment at 68 degrees, create a krausen and attenuate. it might taste kinda like a hefe from beer mixed with yeast from your original bottle.

It is well known that these type of breweries use lager yeasts for bottle conditioning for a number of reasons. Unless it can be verified from the brewery I'd assume it was a lager yeast and buy something from Wyeast or White Labs and pitch that. Why risk it? Wyeast 3068 is what I use for German Wheat beers. that will create the general yeast profile of what you are looking for.

 

[lieb2101]

Right, gotcha. But the whole point to this "experiment" was to re-create the Erdinger flavor and body that is so uncommon to most hefes. That is, lack of a overbearing banana/clove flavor with heavy carbonation.

As far as that goes, it certainly looks like the combination of the WL320 and my Erdinger harvest has accomplished it's goal. Again, I'm not sure if I'll get the same results for future batches with this strain or not but this one turned out good enough that I'll probably try it again.

Thanks for the input!

 

[michael.berta]

Please let us know how it turns out.

 

[lieb2101]

Drinking it right now and it is FANtastic.
I will be using this mystery yeast again in the near future for sure.

I doubt I'll ever be able to re-create this particular brew though due to all the experimenting involved.

 

[LeftyGorilla]

Drinking it right now and it is FANtastic.
I will be using this mystery yeast again in the near future for sure.

I doubt I'll ever be able to re-create this particular brew though due to all the experimenting involved.

This gave me the final push to try this at home. I've been enjoying a bottle or two of the Erdinger Dunkel lately and it reminded me of how much I really like that style. I've got a wheat beer in the primary right now, so I guess I should have done this a few weeks ago...but maybe this is the perfect yeast for bottle conditioning?

I guess I'll pitch a little into the batch I've got going now and keep the rest going for my next wheat.

Prost to one-of-a-kind beers!

 

[LeftyGorilla]

Looking at the dregs in the bottle I thought this would take a while...I've got way too much headspace (though easy to aerate) in a 1 gallon bottle with about 1400 ml of water with 140 grams of DME added to the lees from the Erdinger. Cooked this up after breakfast and it's already pumping CO2 out the airlock.

Half the price of a smack pack and I get to drink a beer? Fuggetaboutit.