Harvesting a heavy top cropper

[Brauerei_Fahr]

Hello folks!

I'm making a Hefeweizen and the yeast is shooting out the blow off tube pretty much every single time I'm brewing this beer.

Since this is such a strong top cropping yeast, and me noticing a drift early on when repitching from the trub, does anyone here use the blow off tube for cropping?

Any concerns about sanitation, with the stainless tube being long and awkward to clean? Positives? Drawbacks?

Might be a stupid question...

[Andy Miller]

We've considered using a kegging apparatus as a blow off tube and having the blow off come out of the keg overflow. We've never done it but it should work.

We currently just soft crash to 60 after D rest and harvest a thinner slurry.

Andy

Hello folks!

I'm making a Hefeweizen and the yeast is shooting out the blow off tube pretty much every single time I'm brewing this beer.

Since this is such a strong top cropping yeast, and me noticing a drift early on when repitching from the trub, does anyone here use the blow off tube for cropping?

Any concerns about sanitation, with the stainless tube being long and awkward to clean? Positives? Drawbacks?

Might be a stupid question...

[Junkyard]

Have any top manway fermenters? If you do grab a 32 oz stainless soup ladle and use it to crop out the top manway.

[Brauerei_Fahr]

No top manways unfortunately... Would be a great idea though... There's a dry hop port but at 4" that would be one brutal crop...

I guess the other question is... That's a pretty low density foam, dry weight of yeast is probably not very high in that... So I guess the receiving keg would have to act as a first propagation vessel and then you'd still have to prop it up from there...

Fill the keg half way with (boiled) wort, have the blow off material enter the wort and hence kickstart the growth? That would all be fermentation though and not aerobic cultivation..

[Brauerei_Fahr]

We've considered using a kegging apparatus as a blow off tube and having the blow off come out of the keg overflow. We've never done it but it should work.

We currently just soft crash to 60 after D rest and harvest a thinner slurry.

Andy

See, as a proper Hefeweizen, you want the yeast that stays in suspension (in my case)... So by crashing with a thinner slurry, do you notice much of a drift/petite mutations?

[Mike Elliott]

We use a pretty powdery kolsch yeast for our hefe and harvest from the cone for up to fifteen generations with good success. We generally harvest after crash, dump trub fairly aggressively and get a density of approx 1E9 cells/ml, which is much thinner than our heavy-floc American yeast. No problems with drift.

[Brauerei_Fahr]

What temperature and OG do you ferment at though?

Being a koelsch, you're probably fairly low mid-high 50s?

The warmer you get the more chance of petite mutation etc, at least my understanding from about 4 year of fermentation engineering..