German Brewing

With the Bock I have down now I tried something new. Instead of transferring off the yeast into a fresh keg and spunding, I simply used a picnic tap to blow off a liter of yeast & wort into my mason jar. (I actually did this in two steps to try to let more yeast settle) Afterwards I hooked up the spunding valve. With this I will ferment, spund, and serve in the same keg.

The yeast seems to have settled out fine in the fridge but is their any disadvantages anyone can see to this?

Pros: Less Oxygen?
Cons: Won't rouse the yeast, potentially more yeast/trub in the first pint or 2?

This seems like a brilliant idea!

Watch out for autolysis. I've had it happen (confirmed via pH rise) on a couple beers that carried too much yeast into lagering (~100 grams sediment left at the bottom) after about 6 weeks.

I'm working on racking with fewer, hopefully healthier cells, closer to the attenuation limit (~0.5 Plato above). I start raising the pressure near the end of primary to pick up some carbonation so I don't need to carry much sugar over into lagering.

That seems like an interesting idea. Does it take a lot of pressure to force the gooey sediment up the dip tube?

I could imagine staged removals of the sediment. Some with most remaining trub early on then more removal toward the end of active fermentation. Would rousing the sediment by keg agitation hurt the beer I wonder? A gentle keg rotation before tapping might dislodge and allow removal of more yeast. May even allow a cleaner yeast sediment to be harvested. Down side maybe though would be loss of more beer.

The autolysis will also release heavy metals too. You'll lose that fresh lingering lodo malt flavor in a week.