[egg]

I'm considering pitching some new yeast at bottling with my current brew, considering how slowly some Belgian strains seem to carbonate at normal room temperature.

I have a 1.078 tripel in the FV, fermenting happily with WLP550. I've done quite a few Belgian beers before, around that OG.  My temps schedule tends to be to hold it around 65f for 4 or 5 days, before gradually raking it up to about 74 for the next two weeks or so.  I then crash it to 36 for a few days, prime, and bottle.  It's not unusual for them to take at least 4 weeks to carbonate at room temperature.  Sure, I can wait that long (and longer) for some maturity to develop anyway, but I have to wonder if there are advantages to reseeding the beer, like many Belgian brewers do.  Keeping the bottles at 74+ would block up my fermenting fridge, as that's the only place I could do that!

Having chilled the beer down for a few days to get it fairly clear, I don't want to introduce excess sediment to the bottles, whether it be yeast, or trub (from option b, below).  Nor do I want any detriment to the long term flavour development.  So do I:

a) Rehydrate a few g of dry yeast (please suggest which, and how much for 20L) and add that to the bottling bucket
b) Get a small (750ml?) 1.040 DME starter going 12 hours before and add that in, as one article says
c) I'm ruling out c), which was to sprinkle in dry yeast, as I did that once before and got uneven clumps, which dropped rapidly in the bottling bucket!
d) Continue without fresh yeast
e) Something else

[kramerog]

a or d.

[denny]

I vote d

[Big Monk]

a) Try the Lallemand CBC-1 conditioning yeast.


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[brewinhard]

a) Try the Lallemand CBC-1 conditioning yeast.


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Have you worked with this one before Derek?

[Big Monk]

a) Try the Lallemand CBC-1 conditioning yeast.


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Have you worked with this one before Derek?

Yup. It works great and is a great flocculator. Drops out in a hard cake.


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[denny]

a) Try the Lallemand CBC-1 conditioning yeast.


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Have you worked with this one before Derek?

Yup. It works great and is a great flocculator. Drops out in a hard cake.


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Yeah, works well if you need to add bottling yeast.  IIRC, Boulevard said that before that they used S-04 (or maybe it was T-58) which might be more easily sourced.  And again, this assumes you need bottling yeast.

[Big Monk]

a) Try the Lallemand CBC-1 conditioning yeast.


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Have you worked with this one before Derek?

Yup. It works great and is a great flocculator. Drops out in a hard cake.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

Yeah, works well if you need to add bottling yeast.  IIRC, Boulevard said that before that they used S-04 (or maybe it was T-58) which might be more easily sourced.  And again, this assumes you need bottling yeast.

I think about less as a need to have bottling yeast and more of a desire to have a level of control and consistency to your carbonation.




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[egg]

I'm grateful for all your thoughts there.  They've definitely helped my thinking.

Like Big Monk says, I'd like to try for a bit more control on this one.  Without a lab and a white coat, I know it's not going to be precise, but I have had a couple or fairly flakey carbonation phases with tripels before, despite carefully measured priming sugar, so I'm willing to give something a go... I think.

Correct me if any of these assumptions are wrong, but I've read that 1m cells/ml is roughly the limit that we notice a haze in (otherwise clear) beer, viewed through a test tube.  That is also the lower end of what Stan H tells us the Belgians are happy with for carbonation, in BLAM.  So I'm thinking I will lager the beer down a little longer than usual, enough to get it around that threshold, as best I can tell, and follow a) with around 2g of dry yeast. 

Denny mentioned s-04; luckily, I have a sachet of that in the fridge, and it certainly sticks like s*%t to the bottom of bottles, and will hopefully be a good choice.  I was unlikely to use it for anything else soon, either! Assuming 6B cells per g (from Fermentis), which is a conservative estimate going by some reports, then that 2g s-04 gives me just over half of my million cells per ml in the 21L (max) I am likely to get into the bottling bucket.  It's a finger-in-the-air really, but I'm going to guess that a week or two at 37f is still going to leave enough of the primary stuff in there to make up any shortfall, and I don't want excess sediment, as per the title.

One other thought, I guess I'm going to have to let my chilled batch come back up to room temperature for priming and bottling, to avoid shocking the freshly rehydrated s-04.  I'd usually just bottle it cold.  Or am I better to rehydrate, and then gently chill down the s-04 mixture... Pretty hard to be gentle and accurate with just 20-30ml of liquid!

[brewinhard]

One other thought, I guess I'm going to have to let my chilled batch come back up to room temperature for priming and bottling, to avoid shocking the freshly rehydrated s-04.  I'd usually just bottle it cold.  Or am I better to rehydrate, and then gently chill down the s-04 mixture... Pretty hard to be gentle and accurate with just 20-30ml of liquid!

You will want to allow the beer to warm up to room temps prior to bottling. It will allow the yeast get to work faster on your priming sugar solution and minimize any worries of oxidation from headspace in the bottle.

[egg]

OK, I bottled this this morning, with 3g of rehydrated s-04 stirred well into the beer as it transferred into the bottling bucket. The beer was at 57f at the time and rising, and I had brought the yeast down gradually to match.

I gave it all another stir just prior to bottling (there was about 20 minutes before I could start, once transferred) which then took about 30-40 minutes.  I noticed a lot of yeast-flakes going into my last three bottles, which I marked and kept aside.  So despite the rehydration, I still had some dropping in that time frame.  Despite a week chilling around 37c, I could see I still picked up a fair amount of the primary yeast from the secondary, so I'm expecting more sediment than ideal one way or the other and it looks pretty turbid, but with stocks low and other commitments on the horizon, I needed to get it bottled!

I'm just wondering if other folk have had the same thing when adding rehydrated yeast at bottling, with flakes sinking while bottling, and whether it's a concern?