Not quite Krausening

[Moonlighter]

I'm throwing this out there as a bit of a sanity check and to see if others have had the same experience.

I've got a 20L Spiedel Braumeister and having read the manual (I know - not very cool) was intrigued by the recommendation to use a quantity of frozen wort from the original brew for priming. Now in the past I've primed into cask and bottle with just about everything and reckon that using a light dried malt extract gives the best results.

The big surprise for me when I used the frozen wort was the quality of the bubbles in the beers I produced. They appear to be much finer.

Now before you flag me up as a lunatic, the quality of the bubbles (the champagne people call it the "mousse") is often used as an indicator of quality in champagne. The finer the bubbles the better the champagne. It has a big impact on the mouthfeel of a wine and the same appears to be true of beer.

Now I accept this isn't krausening because the added wort isn't fermenting when I add it to the green beer - but it seems to work very well by just using the yeast already present in the wort. Sticking a big "beercicle" in the green beer also drops the temperature significantly at racking so I think that may help too.

Has anyone else tried this and noticed this effect?

[gnutz2]

Very interesting find, it may be worth a little experiment.

I tend to find that in the first few weeks of secondary fermentation the bubbles are quite coarse and over tome they get smaller, thats with cane suger, i've never experimented with anything else.

How do you calculate how much frozen wort to to use?

Cheers Baz.

[Moonlighter]

Very good question Baz because they just say 6% or the wort - i.e. 1.5l

Now surely that's got to depend on the OG of the wort?

Messing around with Beersmith I reckon that a 1.050 wort would be around 136g of light DME per litre so for 1.5l we're looking at about 205g to prime 20 litres. I reckon on using around 200g of DME per 20 litres to give 2.5 volumes of CO2 so it's pretty close. The setup has proved excellent at producing some straight bitters at around 4-4.5% ABV with a nice level or carbonation - I guess around 2.0 so that all kind of makes sense.

I guess the issue would be using 6% of a much stronger wort where you could well end up over priming.

BTW I freeze the wort by putting a ziplock bag in a jug and pouring in the wort. I seal up the bag and bung it in the freezer. Easy.

[alix101]

Stop me if I picked the wrong jist to this. .... my only experience with priming with wort is with bottling, I know of award winning micros that use wort to prime, and I enjoy the beer's and the level of carbonation they produce. .. But the one draw back is the shit doesn't stick... You end up tipping a good inch of beer gown the sink as the yeast seems to flake alot more than sugar. ..

[Moonlighter]

I've not noticed a difference. I generally use highly flocculant yeasts - WLP002 and WLP007 - and work on the principle that there's always enough yeast no matter how clear the beer is.

I've always loved Kernel beers but they tend to have plenty of yeast at the bottom. I have always hesitated calling this a "fault" because the beers taste so damn good but maybe they're experiencing what you describe.

I think I'll do a direct comparison on my next bottling. Some primed with DME, some with sugar and some with frozen wort.

[DeGarre]

This method is called speisen in german and I have used it for 49 brews now with my 20L BM. It's dead easy and convenient.