Same yeast in Schneider Aventinus & Original?

[BeaverBrewer1]

I'm slowly working up to what I would call a home laboratory. I've got my pipettes and my ethanol lamp, my loop and agar plates. I've started harvesting some yeast from bottles.

The limiting factor is yeast vitality - since some of the bottles have been at RT at the liquor store for who knows how long.

So far I've succeeded in getting yeast from Aventinus, as well as a french wit ("Britt") - and I think I've got colonies coming up from a bottle of Schneider Original. (You can probably see that wheat beers are my thing.)

Does anyone know whether Schneider uses the same yeast in Aventinus and Original?

I have a starter going of Hefe IV and am planning on trying successive batches of wheat beer using my Hefe IV and Aventinus clones. If the Original picks up, I might try a third batch with it...

 

[BeaverBrewer1]

I realize that my backstory about harvesting yeast might have distracted from my question, which is whether Schneider uses the same yeast in Aventinus and Original. Anyway, no big deal - I couldn't get any living yeast out of the Original bottle anyway.

But I will mention that I have a slightly different way of harvesting yeast. I bought some food agar from an asian grocery, and boiled it (canned it) with some leftover wort from a stout I made - around 1.020 grav. I used it to pour a couple of agar plates (I bought some glass dessert bowls that have plastic lids from the dollar store - cheaper than petri dishes). I also made some agar slants.

To harvest the yeast, I've been 1. sterilizing the mouth of the bottle with a flame, 2. pouring out the contents minus the lees, 3. stirring up the lees, 4. flaming my loop, 5. streaking a loopful onto agar plates. So far I've been able to recover nice colonies from about 50% of the bottles I bought that were refrigerated, and 0% from bottles on the shelf.

 

[Cpt_Kirks]

I JUST read a chapter in "Brewing with Wheat" about Schneider. Yes, they use a house yeast for both, a "very old strain".

The only real difference between the two is Aventinus has more chocolate, is hopped a couple of points higher and has a higher gravity.

(So sayeth Brewmaster Hans-Peter Drexler)

 

[BeaverBrewer1]

That's great! Schneider is my favourite wheat - though I admit I don't like aventinus as much as most people do. I prefer Original or even Sportweisse. But with the original yeast, Weyermann wheat malt, and pils malt, I should be able to get pretty close to a clone...

The only fault with my loop in the bottle method - as I see it - is that I end up picking single colonies. This is a "bottleneck" in genetic terms (and literally), so that my yeast would not have the genetic diversity of Schneider's stock yeast. Oh well. I'm willing to live with that reality.