Harvesting Franziskanner Weissbier yeast

[FirstAidBrewing]

So I'm working through some of my favorite Weiss and am for the first time debating harvesting the residual yeast from the bottle.

Anyone here tried to harvest this yeast? What were your resulting flavors like?

Cheers!

 

[Bassman2003]

Franziskaner uses a lager strain for bottling, so it will not be what you are looking for. Schneider Weisse is the only one I know of that uses its primary strain in bottling. I would try that beer if you have access.

 

[wildactbrewer]

I harvested some yeast out of a commercial Saison once. There was a thread on here about culturing yeast once but I can't find it.

Basically, here was the process (Keep in mind that you literally have to sanitize everything when you do this. Sanitation is insanely important when harvesting and culturing yeast.)

Collect the dregs from as many bottles of your commercial source as you can. (I used six) Then build a small volume low gravity starter. Remember, this yeast has kinda been through it with the lengthy time spent either cold or under pressure. My first stage was a 1/2 qt starter @ 1.020 SG. Let that ferment out. Cold crash and decant. Make another starter at about 1.030 and a full quart this time. Add in your yeast. Ferment and repeat. At this point you can look at performing a yeast wash if you want to get the residual flavors out. As far as cell count goes...you kinda have to eyeball it. The calculators will give you a good idea, but you don't really know your count to start with so it's tough.

I know that's a rough explanation, but hey...I'm on my 4th homebrew.

 

[giraffe]

Franziskaner uses a lager strain for bottling, so it will not be what you are looking for. Schneider Weisse is the only one I know of that uses its primary strain in bottling. I would try that beer if you have access.

This is correct. Hefe breweries use lager strains for bottling.

Schneider you can use, but its available at 3638 from wyeast, so it may not be worth bothering. (That is a lovely strain though.)