Aging in conical fermenter

[bwestcott]

We've just started using 50 hl cylindro-conicals for fermenting our ales. We used to use 25 hl open fermenters and crop the yeast off the bottom after transferring to a cold conditioning tank. Conditioning tanks are in short supply here so the plan is to cold-age in the conical fermentation tanks for a week, maybe two or three. I'm cropping a good chunk of yeast/trub off of the bottom of the tank, but I was wondering how much more I should remove... the concern being, of course, that dying yeast will cause off-flavours to the beer over time.

What do you do with your conical tanks? Remove yeast/trub until beer comes off the bottom? Or remove a small amount (say 20 L) every day or two to remove some of the dead yeast over time? Do you try to remove all the yeast or just most of it (there will always be some in suspension after all)?

Any advice would be appreciated... aside from "buy more conditioning tanks", of course

[beerking1]

If it is only going to be in there 3 weeks or less (even 4 or less), I would not worry too much about autolysis. It takes longer than that for off-flavors to develop.

[kai]

Once you've cropped from the tank you may as well dump all of the rest of the yeast on the bottom, it's no longer doing any more for conditioning so all it'll do now is pose a risk for autolysis, make beer cloudy or filtration harder. We yeast off daily till the runoff looks more like yeasty beer than beery yeast.

[sbradt]

go for it

For years, we had nothing but unitanks for fermentation and conditioning and it worked just fine. We still condition many of our beers in unitanks, as we don't have nearly the conditioning tank space to move them all into them for final conditioning. I've seen beers spend as much as 4-5 weeks in a uni without any off flavors from autolysis. Just make sure you pull yeast frequently, especially if you don't have jacketed cones.

[chaosmaster]

We have a batch of brown ale sitting in the fermentation tank for almost four months now. We cropped the yeast off the tank every three days for the first two weeks, and every other days during the low temperature lagering period, finally reduced the frequency to whenever we feel like to. We all know it is a pain to let ale yeast precipitate even under low temp, but i believe we've managed it well and the ale is naturally clear.

[gitchegumee]

Yeast doesn't do you any good after it's precipitated, so pull frequently and develop a schedule based on what you see. I wouldn't risk autolysis firstly, and secondly yeast slurry is an effective insulator and will hamper your efforts to cool the cone if it's blanketing it. Pull very slowly so you slide the yeast down the cone--too quickly and you'll punch a hole in it. Good luck!

[dick murton]

Ageing in conicals - no problem. I would expect to pull off the main crop for repitching, waste etc, then after another couple of days to settle whilst cool, then once or twice more only. If the beer is cold enough then this will leave very little yeast in suspension, and it is then mainly protein being precipitated. For what it is worth, I had some beer at one brewery and after six months with this type of cropping regime, there was no problem. In fact, I wish we could have afforded to cold store all unfiltered beer for that long, it was so good !!


Cheers

[fullmoonwinery]

Yeast doesn't do you any good after it's precipitated, so pull frequently and develop a schedule based on what you see. I wouldn't risk autolysis firstly, and secondly yeast slurry is an effective insulator and will hamper your efforts to cool the cone if it's blanketing it. Pull very slowly so you slide the yeast down the cone--too quickly and you'll punch a hole in it. Good luck!

fantastic advice, i love this forum. i am planning to leave my cider in the FV until its ready to bottle, no tank transfers at all, BIP brew in place. i will lower the temp for clearing and conditioning to as low as my chillers will go (5degC) and drain off the yeast from the conical bottom every few days, but i never though of the doing it slowly thing to avoid punching a hole. this makes perfect sense.

thanks again to all