New brew on the trub of the las - Bad? Dangerous?t

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Tony1951

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I've been cranking up my beer stocks so that I can allow my brews to age a bit so I have brewed five brews in a row right on top of the trub of the others. As soon as the beer was racked off to the bottling bucket, a new brew went into the trubby FV. I was keen to avoid that horrible twelve hour lag between putting in yeast and something happening in the very fertile bacterial food of wort at 22C. These brews took off like a motor bike within the hour each time, running a more or less constant stream of bubbles out of the airlock. Brews at 1045 OG were down to 1008 in five days and some low alcohol brews (two of) at 1025 were done in two days.

All of these brews taste great, even though a couple of them are not clear yet, but at the end of the last brew I dumped the trub and sterilised the vessel, wondering if I might be taking a chance on things going bad. I had a stack of yeast in there at the end of this, but it was all sweat smelling stuff.

Is this risky behaviour? :)

I now have a hell of a lot of beer in the garage so there is a chance that some of it will actually get to a decent age before being drunk.
 
I have no idea on the effects this will have sorry, but I like the idea so will follow this post and the responses for sure! Do you scrape any of the trub away? Also what about a secondary FV? - might help with the clarity a bit without holding up production?
 
I have no idea on the effects this will have sorry, but I like the idea so will follow this post and the responses for sure! Do you scrape any of the trub away? Also what about a secondary FV? - might help with the clarity a bit without holding up production?

Hi Steviewell.

I did skim off some free floating citra that was left over from some dry hopping, but even then, I didn't get it all. I started this with a 23litre brew of Coopers IPA for bottling, followed up with a 10 litre brew in the same FV of Clibit's simple AG recipe, then again with another low alcohol version of Cooper's IPA for the keg, and ended with a five day galloping fermentation of a Cooper's English Bitter at 5% ABV all done back to back, one out - one in within about 30 minutes of emptying one and in with the next. Honestly, within the hour of filling up the vessel with wort there is a no interval stream of bubbles - glub, glub, blub, blub like an engine. :)

The way I did it was to put in about 15 litres of cold water, poured in from about three feet high to aerate the water, then stir in about three litres of hot, but not boiling concentrate made up of the Coopers can, hot water and the brew enhancer, keeping an eye on the temperature so as not to scald the yeast. It seemed to come out exactly right at about 22C by the time I made up the volume to 23 litres with water.

I was thinking that if the yeast smelled OK and had just produced a decent tasting beer (albeit cloudy and green) there was no contamination, but I wondered about old dead cells becoming a problem if I carried this on much past a month.

There are probably good reasons not to do this that I don't know about though.

Yes - a quiet period in another vessel while the beer settles down would probably help clear it faster and create a finer yeast deposit in the bottles or keg. Not sure it would be fermenting though. These beers all went down to 1008 except my simple AG one which stopped at 1015, probably because I didn't keep good enough control of temperature while mashing and made too many hard to ferment sugars. I forget the name of them. I think the mash temperature was a touch on the high side for too long on that brew.
 
I do this as well to reduce the cost of yeast - a packet of decent yeast costs about £3 so I make it do 2 brews. Works fine. In the past I've gone as far as doing 3 brews consecutively on the trub but although ok I found the 3rd brew to be noticeably not as good as the first. Of course your standards of sanitation might be a bit better than mine :lol: - all I do is slosh a bit of boiling water around!
 
I do this as well to reduce the cost of yeast - a packet of decent yeast costs about £3 so I make it do 2 brews. Works fine. In the past I've gone as far as doing 3 brews consecutively on the trub but although ok I found the 3rd brew to be noticeably not as good as the first. Of course your standards of sanitation might be a bit better than mine :lol: - all I do is slosh a bit of boiling water around!

CWRW666 - lol - I don't make any great claims about sanitation. I just wash everything before use and use a teaspoon per gallon of sanitiser for ten minutes, then rinse in cold tap water for anything going into the brew - especially at the sweat wort stage. Once santitised and fermenting, I keep the lid on and avoid interfering until airlock activity stops. Then I might dump in a measure of hops for dry hopping, or rack off and start a new brew.

I'm wondering about dead yeasts building up though, although some folk leave brews on the trub for as much as four weeks. I think my yeast had been dumped by then.
 
I've read lots of threads where people describe doing this successfully. My feeling is that it seems like a huge amount of yeast. You can over pitch. I put the yeast into sanitised tubs and plastic bottles. I use the Mr Malty yeast pitching calculator to estimate how much slurry to use. It makes liquid yeasts cheap to use.
 
For the last 20 years we've been living with our own spring water supply that is more than a little contaminated so for brewing I've had to boil all the water I use. So since then whenever I've done this I've made a brew, let it cool in the Fv to pitching temperature and then scraped a couple of spoonfuls of trub from the previous brew and added it to the new one. I guess this would limit the effects of overpitching.
It also occurs to me that if you don't let the beer stand in the FV after fermenting for a week or so then there's no opportunity for the yeast to `clear up after itself' so although the beer will taste fine it might well be quite head-achey. Just a thought. :lol:
 
For the last 20 years we've been living with our own spring water supply that is more than a little contaminated so for brewing I've had to boil all the water I use. So since then whenever I've done this I've made a brew, let it cool in the Fv to pitching temperature and then scraped a couple of spoonfuls of trub from the previous brew and added it to the new one. I guess this would limit the effects of overpitching.
It also occurs to me that if you don't let the beer stand in the FV after fermenting for a week or so then there's no opportunity for the yeast to `clear up after itself' so although the beer will taste fine it might well be quite head-achey. Just a thought. :lol:

Thanks for the advice Cwrw666.

I never thought of headaches. I thought that was more likely by letting the fermentation temperature rise too high. I have enough beer now to be able to let it stand though so I will probably do that next time.

Cheers
 
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