Question on bottling aged bourbon ale

[RonnieBBrewer]

I have a 5 gallon batch of bourbon ale that sat in a secondary for almost a month now. I will be adding oak cubes which have been soaking in 100 proof Wild Scotsman Scotch Malt Whisky for 4 weeks. I plan on tasting it after each month until I feel it's right for bottling. Question is...I think there may not be enough yeast cells to carbonate the beer after aging for so long with the cubes. I've seen varying ideas on adding yeast at bottling time. Has anyone done this and if so, how much do I add and how?

Thanks!

 

[stjackson]

If you think there's any question about it carbonating, go ahead and add the extra insurance of adding fresh yeast at bottling. I did a lager recently where I just added a gram of dry yeast (US-05) to some boiled, cooled water for a few minutes (to rehydrate) and dumped it in the bottling bucket with my priming sugar and then racked on top.

I wish I had done it with the barleywine I brewed last summer. It sat for six months in the bottle with absolutely zero carbonation. I ended up opening each beer yesterday and adding a bit of yeast slurry to each bottle with a pipette to get some fresh yeast in there to carbonate it.

I will never again try to bottle a lager or high ABV beer without adding fresh yeast.

 

[RonnieBBrewer]

If you think there's any question about it carbonating, go ahead and add the extra insurance of adding fresh yeast at bottling. I did a lager recently where I just added a gram of dry yeast (US-05) to some boiled, cooled water for a few minutes (to rehydrate) and dumped it in the bottling bucket with my priming sugar and then racked on top.

Thanks, I think that's what I'll do. Do you think I should use the same yeast (Yeast 1028) that I fermented with or some US-05? I have some 05 in the fridge.

 

[stjackson]

I used US-05 because it's cheap and I didn't have anything fresh in the fridge. It's also a fairly clean yeast so I wasn't concerned with it adding any flavors that I didn't want. Certainly using the same yeast ensures that you won't have anything weird going on, but it's such a relatively small amount of sugar to ferment that I don't think it makes a big difference. I certainly wouldn't open a new pack of liquid yeast just to bottle condition, though.

 

[biochemedic]

Re-yeasting for bottle conditioning is a pretty standard technique in Belgian brewing according to the book Brew Like A Monk. I had actually e-mailed White Labs about it and the reply from one of their lab guys (who is also a homebrewer) was to use about half a tube of fresh yeast. I tried this for a pretty big quad (used the same fermentation strain) and it still took a while to carb, but I think my storage temps were more to blame for that...

I think if I were to try it again, I'd probably just use a dry champagne yeast, as I agree with stjackson you'd be pretty unlikely to get any fermentation character from just the priming sugar...

 

[Calder]

If the beer is less than 6 months from brewing I just bottle. If it is over 6 months, I add some of a fresh starter to the bottling bucket of whatever yeast I am growing at the time.

I've never had a problem with a beer under 6 months, but I also don't cold crash. Most of my beers sit for about 3 months prior to bottling.

 

[HopHoarder]

Ah that explains the lack of carbonation in my barleywine. I didn't think to add some fresh yeast before bottling but now that I've read this I think it's a good idea.

 

[AaronWadzinski]

Yeah, a guy from our homebrew club bought an old Jack Daniel's barrel from a winery, which used it to age wine in for a while too (Arrington Vineyards antebellum wine). Anyhow, we all decided on a recipe (imperial belgian wit) and each person brewed a share, and then all of us brought it to his house to fill the barrel.
That was about 6 months ago, and now he just delivered my share back to me. Pretty much everyone else in the group has a kegging system, so I am the only one that is going to bottle my share. I was a little worried about the viability of the yeast after all this time... I have a few packs of yeast leftover from when I used a few pre-hopped kits, but used some other yeast I was propagating at the time, so looks like I'll have a use for them after all... I'll just re-hydrate one of those packs, and ad it to the bottling bucket with the corn sugar.