loftybrewer
Well-Known Member
Greetings! This is my first post and first thread. I am in secondary on my first brew - an oaked IPA - and I am looking at the yeast sediment thinking that I should harvest it. It is right now at around 35 degrees underneath an inch of wort in a concrete cellar. Anyhoo, I was reading threads about yeast washing and I wondered how primitive brewers got and used their yeast. I remember hearing or reading that in Scandinavia, families had their own proprietary yeast strains that lived within their stirring sticks. These sticks were used to stir the wort and it also reintroduced the yeast into the new brew. I was reading Stephen Harrod Buhner's Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers and he writes that Norwegian brewers of old would drop juniper branches into the fermenter with the wild yeast that they caught. The yeast would produce a sediment during fermentation and cover the branches. After drawing off the brew, the branches werepulled out and hung to dry. Then they were simply dropped into the next batch and the cycle began again.
SO the question is: How viable do you think this method of reusing your yeast is? I would welcome any anecdotal, experiential, scientific, intuitive, or spectral analyses that you folks may have. I would post in the wild brew section but I figured they'd be too enthusiastic about it and I'd rather get it straight. What do you think?
SO the question is: How viable do you think this method of reusing your yeast is? I would welcome any anecdotal, experiential, scientific, intuitive, or spectral analyses that you folks may have. I would post in the wild brew section but I figured they'd be too enthusiastic about it and I'd rather get it straight. What do you think?