Bottling Maibock - add yeast?

[MaineBrewer]

I'll be bottling my first maibock (helles bock?) today or tomorrow. This has been lagering in secondary for about 2months now. Should I add more yeast to the bottling bucket or is there sufficient yeast still around to eat the priming sugar?

If I was going to add yeast; I wash/reuse/harvest my yeast, so I was going to add about a teaspoon of liquid harvested yeast to the bottling bucket. Give it all a gentle stir to ensure it's all mixed.

This is the first time that I've bottled a lager that's been lagering this long, so I don't have any experience.

[Östertulls bryggeri]

Add more yeast, a teaspoon of harvest yeast will be fine. Just let it dissolve in the bucket for 20 minutes, and then bottle the beer.

[Weizenberg]

Adding yeast after 2 months of conditioning is an interesting experiment. You can do it at the expense of running into interesting results, for better or worse.

By now pretty much everyting the yeast has been able to process should be pretty much done. It'll go on if you leave it longer but I wouldn't risk oxidising it by opening the lid. During the cold phase oxygen uptake is to be avoided at all costs.

I'd drop the temperatrure to -1.5 to -2.0 Celsius for at least two weeks so you get a nice clear pour.

[MaineBrewer]

UPDATE:
I bottled without adding yeast. I was a bit impatient and figured WTF?
Checking the bottles (I package some in PET bottles so I can do the "squeeze test"), they seem ready. Going to wait another day/two before I move them to the fridge.

[Weizenberg]

I think you need to learn about speise and how to calculate the extract needed to carbonate during bottle conditioning.

Any decent text about wheat beer should explain this

[MaineBrewer]

Very interesting - I did get Speise and Krausening confused as one and the same.

I now have to read up on the amount of Speise needed to achieve the correct level of carbonation.

[alan.messner]

I'd like to fill my bottles directly out of my spunding keg. I will loose some C02 without a counterpressure filler. they seem a pain to use and clean. If I purchased a metered dispenser, say 10 ml, I am thinking I could mix my priming sugar and krausen starter to add an active krausen yeast to end up with a yeast population that will scavenge my DO pickup from bottling before it affects my beer. I would add the 10 ml squirt to each bottle and fill each bottle with a normal push down filler. I am taking this idea directly from the Helles paper. Any thoughts?

[Weizenberg]

Very interesting - I did get Speise and Krausening confused as one and the same.

I now have to read up on the amount of Speise needed to achieve the correct level of carbonation.

Almost every German brewing program does the calculations for you, for e.g. Kleiner Brauhelfer or the Brew Recipe Developer (BRD) -- which do a very good job at this.

I've been working with the BRD for nearly 6 years now and strongly recommend it. Unfortunately, both don't have an English manual, but you should be able to figure it out.

If you want to calculate it by hand, you can try reading up on it in "German Wheat Beer" by Eric Warner. It's an average book however. There are quite a few things not mentioned or simply missing. The section on mashing is pure folklore. It does however, explain the concept of Speise rather well.

[Weizenberg]

I'd like to fill my bottles directly out of my spunding keg. I will loose some C02 without a counterpressure filler. they seem a pain to use and clean. If I purchased a metered dispenser, say 10 ml, I am thinking I could mix my priming sugar and krausen starter to add an active krausen yeast to end up with a yeast population that will scavenge my DO pickup from bottling before it affects my beer. I would add the 10 ml squirt to each bottle and fill each bottle with a normal push down filler. I am taking this idea directly from the Helles paper. Any thoughts?

Kraeusen has nothing to do with bottling. You can do it but your results will be very inconsistent unless you possess expensive analysis equipment.

You are wasting your money too. You already made the sugar by making wort. I actually can taste priming sugar in the end product. It's a lot nicer (and proper) to use wort as priming agent. It's a very simple method (and cheap).

Now, as you add wort to prime your bottle (in Bavaria we call the priming wort "Speise"), the fermentation will continue and use up and scavange the oxygen. You really don't need to worry about oxygen intake when bottle conditioning since it will be consumed by the yeast before it becomes a problem.

Keep it simple. Overcomplicating things only introduces nasty errors.

[Smellyglove]

I'd like to fill my bottles directly out of my spunding keg. I will loose some C02 without a counterpressure filler. they seem a pain to use and clean. If I purchased a metered dispenser, say 10 ml, I am thinking I could mix my priming sugar and krausen starter to add an active krausen yeast to end up with a yeast population that will scavenge my DO pickup from bottling before it affects my beer. I would add the 10 ml squirt to each bottle and fill each bottle with a normal push down filler. I am taking this idea directly from the Helles paper. Any thoughts?

Kraeusen has nothing to do with bottling. You can do it but your results will be very inconsistent unless you possess expensive analysis equipment.

You are wasting your money too. You already made the sugar by making wort. I actually can taste priming sugar in the end product. It's a lot nicer (and proper) to use wort as priming agent. It's a very simple method (and cheap).

Now, as you add wort to prime your bottle (in Bavaria we call the priming wort "Speise"), the fermentation will continue and use up and scavange the oxygen. You really don't need to worry about oxygen intake when bottle conditioning since it will be consumed by the yeast before it becomes a problem.

Keep it simple. Overcomplicating things only introduces nasty errors.

You are not alone when it comes to tasting bottling sugar. After I got tips from you guys here on the forum I tested speise a few months back, and haven't looked back. Always felt it was something "off" with sugar carbonated beers. (I've been kegging for a few years now).

Now I can pick up the taste of sugar in every light (like in german "hell") beer I get offered from homebrewers. Did side by side splitbatch-carbonation with sugar and speise, and sugar for carbonation is a no-go. I challenged a person from my local homebrew-forum to do a split bottling, speise and sugar. His wife said that the sugar-fermented bottles comparing to the spesie-fermented bottles taste like "the taste you get right before you vomit". I myself feel it taste more like straight up fat. Anyhow, it adds a taste to the beer which should't be there.