moving yeast

[paulcgi]

I've got an american red fermenting along in a 7 gal stainless conical. On top of that yeast "cake" I want to put corky's happy wife beer. I would like to have some temp control on this but my conical won't fit in the chest freezer, only carboys will.

so... whacha think about how to move the yeast cake from the conical to a carboy? open the bottom dump valve and drain it out (along with some of the red ale)?
rack the ale off of it and then use distilled water to wash the yeast out of the conical and into another container to then transfer over to the carboy? or should I just bail on this one and ferment as-is?
fermenter is in the basement at ambient of about 64. temp in the conical during fermentation was 68-70 (yea. those nottingham yeasties were busy!)

[BrewDog]

Sounds like what I'd do in this case if I wanted to get the 2nd batch going before the 1st is done.

Note that when you want to rack onto an existing yeast cake, you normally rack a bigger, darker beer onto the cake from a smaller, lighter beer. This is to preserve color and to keep the yeast viable. I have heard that Yeast that go from a HUGE beer to a small beer will sometimes shut down, kind of like they all turn lazy and they 'think' "Screw this. The other dudes can handle this without me". In this case, I think you'll be ok, though, because you will be going into similar gravityl, and you'll be using a partial cake and washing it.

[paulcgi]

k.thanks. I guess I forgot to put on there that the first batch is done. ready to move to secondary. I was just going to dump the new brew on top but thought about temp control after the fact. I might just try it and see what happens

[HogieWan]

Originally posted by paulcgi
k.thanks. I guess I forgot to put on there that the first batch is done. ready to move to secondary.

why have a conical if you're going to move it to a secondary?

[paulcgi]

because the conical won't fit in the chest freezer and I want to drop the temp, crash it and do some "cold conditioning"

[HogieWan]

Originally posted by paulcgi
because the conical won't fit in the chest freezer and I want to drop the temp, crash it and do some "cold conditioning"

are you kegging yet?

[paulcgi]

yep.. and after I wrote this stuff I was like "DUH" put it in the keg.

but murphy's law came up (murphy was an ___hole)
and my water well isn't producting like it should.. most projects are on hold now.. this is gonna be expensive

but gotta brew.. anyway.. the original issue was, regardless of what I do with the current batch, I dont want to ferment the next in the conical. I want to put it in the chest freezer for temp control. so, hogie, would you use some of the existing batch to dump the yeast out the bottom OR rack that beer out, then use cooled,boiled water to rinse the yeast out the bottom port?

[HogieWan]

I'd rack the beer off the yeast first. Maybe add some cooled boiled water and give it a day to let the yeast settle again, and rack the diluted beer off the top.