I just recently purchased the book "Clone Brews" and noticed that for most of the high gravity recipes it says to prime the beer in secondary with a fresh dose of the same strain of yeast used to ferment it 3 days before bottling it. Is this necessary and why?
Priming high gravity beer with yeast
- Thread starter castillo
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jeepinjeepin
Well-Known Member
Yeast that spend too much time in a stressful environment such as high alcohol may go dormant and not bottle condition properly or carbonate at all. New yeast will not have these problems.
jeepinjeepin
Well-Known Member
You are only trying to work through 3-4 points of sugar. I wouldn't think a starter would be needed.
Most of the time when folks are adding fresh yeast for high grav beers, they do it on bottling day, just adding it to the bucket, along with the priming solution and the beer. I'm not quite sure of their logic behind doing it three days before. Unless they're thinking is that if there were still unfermentable sugars in there, the yeast would eat those before the priming sugar was added, and therefore preventing bottle bombs....
FYI, a lot of folks just use dry yeast, in particular Champagne yeast. Since it's pretty neutral.
dirty_martini
Well-Known Member
I just add it to the bottling bucket the day of bottling. I rehydrate first just so that it will get incorporate into the beer better and make sure to still it around so that its in suspension while Im bottling.
