German Brewing

Nico touched on this a bit above but I was also thinking about your pitching temps verses the temp of your slurry. What temps are you able to chill your wort down to for pitching and what temp is your slurry stored at? Maybe there's a bit of yeast shocking going on here?

You can propagate at pitching temps. But it will take longer.

Annemüller recommends to propagate the last step closer to main fermentation temperatures.

Apologies for commenting late. Here is another perspective in oxygenation. For the last 6 years, about 200 batches, I have been oxygenating the same way after advice from a German pro brewer. As a fermenter, I use 30L Speidels (33L total volume) filled with 21-23 L of wort. I close it, put it sideways, and shake / rock it for 3-4 min. For beers over 18P, I gave it another shake at 8-12h. That's it... Never had an under attenuated beer --because of yeast --
Despite many system iterations, I have kept this constant because it never failed me.

Check that your fermentation chamber thermometers are calibrated, plus confirm you are measuring beer with thermowell and not chamber itself.

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How do you perform your FFT? I've read some posts where guys using stir plates or shaking their samples often were seeing a bigger difference compared to the main batch. I just initially shake mine, let it sit for 48 hours and it's always within 1 point. I wonder if keeping the yeast in suspension by stir plate gives those FFT more attenuation?

Moving the yeast indeed does accelerate fermentation. The downside is potential higher diacetyl in the end product. However, this is for much larger fermentation systems with agitators -- which are still in use.

Too much yeast growth at start will indeed produce more diacetyl. See

Shaking it a few times should not have a noticeable effect apart from the before mentioned benefits. Considering that this is a practical possibility (for homebrewers definitively), then that is quite good advice indeed! Quodos to Ricardo for putting the finger firmly on this solution.

(Substantially) larger volumes use thermal zones to encourage yeast movements (see ZKV). It's not as rough as using an agitator outright. None of this should be a concern for micro volumes though.

I'd keep it as simple as possible.

It's lazy 'as fuck'... I teach this a lot of programmers to get closer to the real thing.