Top cropping with little krausen

[dabeers]

Hey all. So I top cropped for the first time yesterday-used some wlp004 irish ale from a Red for a Pumpkin Stout. The Red had been fermenting for 3 days with good airlock activity, about halfway down on its gravity. Had my Pumpkin Stout nice and cool, ready for pitching, opened up the bucket and there was minimal krausen-basically just a layer of yeast rafts. I scooped half of the rafts with some beer-probably about 200ml worth (more beer than anything), and pitched into the stout. No activity now 24hrs.

Now before everyone gets all mad about fermentation taking 48-72 hrs for signs, etc, usually people say that when they top crop they get crazy activity early. Esp with little krausen, I wanted to know if people recommended I go ahead and pitch some us-05 backup to not stress the yeast out/get fermentation going before infection can creep in. Thoughts?

 

[PurpleJeepXJ]

You top cropped yeast but did you make a viable starter out of them before you repitched to the new batch? If not you could have only gotten like 1m yeast when you need 1billion...

 

[dabeers]

no starter, I was under the impression that pitching directly from wort to wort the yeast are good to go-like using slurry immediately. But of course I have a lot less concentration with minimal krausen.

 

[COLObrewer]

Yea, you need to do this during high kreusen for it to take off on fresh wort. You probably could have harvested some from the bottom with an autosiphon or something though at that point.

 

[dabeers]

Ive been using a little fermcap to avoid blowoffs-didn't think until after I already added it that it will decrease the krausen I had to top crop. Oh well, added some spare us-05 last night, will get a different profile but hopefully avoid infection with too much lag time. Next time ill open the fermentor to look at how much krausen I have BEFORE i go ahead and brew the batch.