Re-seeding

[cwrw]

If a beer requires cool storage (2c) to condition in a secondary
vessel for a month is it not possible to bring this back to warm temperature and prime for bottling - if not can you simply re-seed by dumping a bottom third of a bottled conditioned market brew into this for a couple of days then mix in priming sugar prior to bottling in a couple of hours?
Any takers?

 

[phettebs]

In theory, yes, you could do this. However, you have no good way of knowing the viability of that bottle conditioning yeast. It may actually be in worse shape than what you still have in solution within your secondary. Most times I've heard of people using the yeast from a commercial beer is to propagate a starter because they want to use the brewery's house yeast on their next batch. In short, I wouldn't trust that yeast to carbonate my whole batch.

On a side note, I have a friend who never adds new yeast to his beers. He cold conditions them for 2 months near freezing and adds gelatin to further clarify the beer. They still carbonate for him just fine, albeit more slowly.

If it were me, I'd just rehydrate some S-04, Notty, etc. and re-yeast at bottling. If you don't care a ton about the batch you could try it as an experiment I suppose.

Barry