Quote:
Originally Posted by BlackDog
LH, how do you go about harvesting and propgating the yeast from the Fantome saison? Does one bottle yield enough yeast to work with?
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You basically pour the beer out carefully and try not to disturb the bottom of the bottle, leave as much as you can in the bottle before getting any of the yeast from the bottom into the glass, I err on the side of caution. Then you swirl around the remaining beer to get the yeast off the bottom that is stuck there. Have your small starter ready when you drink the beer.
You have to baby the starter, start small (pint or less) and clean (sanitized well, as always) and with low gravity starter wort (say below 1.030) and then build it up (add more starter wort when you see yeast activty for a while), and then build it up again until you get a useasble amount (for your 5gallon batch or whatever). I'd say it has worked nine times out of ten with various bottle conditioned beers, the failures may have been my fault or maybe there just wasn't any viable yeast in the bottle. But most of the time it works, just make sure it is a bottle conditioned beer and that the brewery doesn't pasteurize or filter and bottle with a different yeast strain than you want for your beer.
Hope this covers it, hope I was specific enough, but I'm not very scientific with this stuff.....relatively speaking, it is brewing after all.
Let me know if you have any other questions.