Culturing yeast from bottles

[jaquiss2005]

Had a couple of successful brews culturing yeast from bottles of Duvel and Chimay, doing the bulk in a fermenter with packet yeast, and doing a 1 gallon "trial" with the cultured yeast in demijohns.

Looking to have a go at the Petrus Tripel from the Clone Brews book this weekend, and have just made a starter with 200g DME and 2 litres of water and the bottom part of a bottle of Westmalle Tripel.

Will this give me sufficient yeast for 19 litres? If not, what do I need to do?

 

[oz11]

It may work, but generally it's better to start with a small volume starter and step up in stages because of the small amount of viable yeast you are going to find in your bottle.

Something like 50ml - 100ml of 1020og wort as the the first step, next step upto a factor of 10 times that, and so on, to give you decent yeast growth.

 

[Stihler]

As OZ11 said it is best to slowly step up volume with no more than an 10 times increase between steps.

What you suggest may work fine but you need to be very diligent with respect to sanitization.

Note also that the yeast used in bottling may not necessarily be the yeast to during fermentation. I found that out the hard way when I retrieved the yeast from a nice bottle of weizen. It turns out they bottled the beer using lager yeast. Therefore, what I intended to be a Bavarian Weizen was more of a California Common/American Wheat Beer. It was an interesting beer but not exactly what I was going for.

- Scott

 

[jaquiss2005]

Thanks for the tips - just to let you know I brewed Saturday. Had to wait till Sunday for this to cool sufficiently as I don't have a wort chiller. Pitched at 20 degrees yesterday morning and this morning lovely yeasty head in the fermenting bucket.