re-pitch methods from converted keg

[BullyBrewingCo]

Hey folks,

I recently had a sankey keg converted into a yeast brink for our 15bbl system in order to move us away from the food grade plastic buckets we had been using. I had a 1.5 inch tri clamp welded on the bottom and a 4 inch tri clamp lid put on top with a pressure gauge, prv and another 1.5 inch valve.

So here is my question for you folks that use something similar: How do you get the yeast into the fermenter? Our heat exchanger is a bit undersized for the brew house, so we knock out about 76-78 and then use the jackets to cool the wort down to 68. We use a very flocculant strain of yeast, so we would have to put some serious pressure on the yeast to get it out the bottom of the storage keg if we were going to use straight co2. This time I'm going to fill the fermenter, cool it, and then hook up a centrifugal pump from the dump valve on the fermenter through the bottom of the yeast keg and out the top to the racking port on the FV and re-circulate until I think all the yeast is broken up and out of the yeast storage keg and then use pressure to remove the remaining liquid.

Anybody have any suggestions or SOP that they would be willing to share? I'm not thrilled about having to use the pump which I think will increase chances for infection significantly.

Thanks,

Rob

[brewmaster 2011]

I put a T with 2 valves on my transfer hose then one more hose valved at each end and connect the the T valve to the fermenter and the valved hose to my yeast brink and the other valve with the t and push the yeast with co2 while i am knocking out the wort.

[Woolsocks]

I put a T with 2 valves on my transfer hose then one more hose valved at each end and connect the the T valve to the fermenter and the valved hose to my yeast brink and the other valve with the t and push the yeast with co2 while i am knocking out the wort.

We do something similar. Works fine. K.I.S.S.

[kai]

You ought to be able to push out with CO2 no worries. Our two main yeast strains are also highly flocculent.

If you need to, manually agitate the shit out of the keg to get the slurry back into suspension and then push it through.

[Ted Briggs]

As brew said- Also you can close the valve to the fv and fill the brink with wort then reopen. This will thin out the yeast and make it eisier to push out during transfer. Two 2" ports with poly caps are good on top too. One for a flashlight and the other to look though to gauge volume/cleanout.

[BullyBrewingCo]

Thanks for the responses guys, we ended up flooding the keg with wort and then just using co2 to push out the yeast. I was pretty surprised because our yeast slurry seems to set like cement

Thanks again!

[lhall]

We have the same setup. We fill the sanitized yeast brink keg with the right weight of yeast, then connect it to the sanitized fermenter. When we knock out, we go into the top of the yeast brink, and into the fermenter. At the end of knockout we push the remaining wort into the fermenter using CO2 at our oxygenation stone after the HX. The yeast seems to get mixed in well using this method.