Saturday morning I got to try my hand at yeast farming. I was ready to bottle my Belgian IPA and wanted to save the yeast for future brewing. Originally I had planned on just pitching another beer on top of the yeast cake, but I didn’t want to brew another Belgian for my next beer. I read a great guide on yeast washing HERE and decided to give it a try.
Using the method in the guide, I was able to harvest four yeast starts from my fermenter. Here is a shot of the yeast separating from the trub in a couple quart jars.
After the trub fell out, I transferred the suspended yeast into four pint jars. This shot is of the jars in my fridge, 72 hours after washing. The harvested yeast is the thin layer at the bottom of each jar.
I was feeling pretty good about my accomplishment, so I went ahead and brewed up another batch of beer Saturday afternoon. I decided to step up from an extract recipe and mini-mash a Porter using DeathBrewer’s Easy Partial Mash Brewing guide. Here is the recipe for a 5.5 gallon batch of my Porter.
60% Brewhouse Efficiency
5.0 lbs Extra Light DME
2.5 lbs Munich Malt 10L
1.0 lbs Crystal Malt 80L
1.0 lbs Chocolate Malt
0.5 lbs Wheat Malt
.25 lbs Black Patent Malt
0.5 Columbus Hops @ 60 min.
0.5 Centennial Hops @ 10 min.
Nottingham Yeast – rehydrated
Boil Volume: 6.5 gallons
Batch Size: 5.5 gallons
OG: 1.060
FG: 1.015
ABV: 5.8%
IBU: 30
SRM: 37
The grain bill for my recipe is based loosely on Avery’s New World Porter. I chose the Notty yeast because it will have little affect on the overall flavor of the beer. I am trying to establish a baseline recipe that I can play around with during future brewing sessions. I am planning a Smoked Porter using Briess’s Cherry Wood Smoked Malt and a Belgian Porter, using some candy sugar and my reclaimed yeast.
In another two weeks when my Belgian IPA is carbed up, I’ll crash a couple bottles in the freezer so I can try the brew and write up my early impressions. Once the beer is fully conditioned, I’ll pick up a bottle of Stone’s Cali-Belgique (my brew’s inspiration) and invite some friends over to do a side-by-side. I did fill up a 20oz soda bottle with my IPA, so I could easily check the color and clarity as it conditions. Here it is after a few days in the bottle.
It’s a lot redder that I remember when it went into the fermenter. The aroma has subsided a bit, but I was still getting a lot of citrus and Belgian fruitiness when I bottled. And yes, that is a lot of fall-out in the bottom of the bottle. This was the last bottle pulled from the fermenter, so it got more sediment than the rest.
Cheers!
Kevin