After reading this article on krausening, I began to wonder about using it to speed up the production of big beers. The article states that introducing fresh, active yeast will "clean up" the beer.
Does anyone have experience with adding actively fermenting beer to post-primary beer?
I tried krausening several times before giving up on it. It's much more inexact than sugar, since the fermentability of the wort you prime with is inexact. It takes longer for the beer to carbonate. And there is no advantage to the flavor of the beer. I went back to using sugar since it was much more exact and predictable. The one place krausening can be advantageous is in reducing diacetyl in already fermented beers. The actively fermenting wort reduces the diacetyl.
Very interesting article, I just may have to try this. After reading the article, it looks like krausening will "better" condition a beer, but I don't know for sure if it will condition a beer faster. I believe it will carbonate faster because of the amount of yeast and the vigorous fermentation, but once the beer is carbonated I imagine it will condition just like any other beer would. This does look like a better method though, reading about how the active yeast in the beer in a high krausen state will clean up diacetyl and the like looks great, I will definitely have to give this a try and see if my beer is cleaner than usual.
Good article. I would think that it would NOT speed up conditioning. Conditioning starts after you bottle. By introducing beer that is still fermenting you are adding more active yeast and more sugars that need to be turned into alcohol. The beefits like the article said would be to bring your final gravity down more and clean up some of the by products left by your exhausted yeast in a big beer but thats about it. From my understanding and experience if you do this you will want to transfer to a secondary for a big beer because it will take 3 to 4 weeks to stop fermenting and since your adding more sugars it might take another week or 2 to finish out again and you dont want your beer on the yeast cake that long. The best way I think for a big beer is to make a started first. then when you put your wort in the fermenter vigerously stir it up to get as much o2 in the wort as possible for the yeast. Then add the starter to the wort after a few hours before it starts to krausen stir it up more to add more O2 to the wort so the yeast are stronger to do there work then let it ferment and then you can do what the article said if you want to clean the byproducts up from the yeast and lower your final gravity some more.
