Bottle Conditioning High Gravity Beer

I've heard good things about the Danstar CBC yeast for bottle conditioning, but haven't tried it. Champagne yeast has worked for me, and is cheap.

 

The cbc yeast is what you seek. I pitch a satchel in the bottling bucket with my priming sugar, cheap insurance.

 

There are some strains like CBC with limited ability to ferment complex sugars but with high alcohol tolerance. Champagne yeast has been used for similar reasons. I believe t58 is derived from a bottling yeast. However, I’ve never used any of these solely for priming. I’ve used notty and us05 for this. If they also fermented some complex sugars, it wasn’t enough to make bottle bombs or to make me think I ended up with a different beer than I wanted.

Worth noting: in my experience it takes longer for high grav beers to reach peak carbonation

 

I bottle conditioned a 12+% RIS (fermented with US-05) and added some dry CBC yeast at bottling. Bottles were stored at 72 degrees and the first one opened was undercarbed at 5 weeks. I sat on them. It took 3 months, but they have all been perfectly carbed (for my priming sugar) since.

 

+1 for cbc has carbed beers up to 14% for me with good results.

 

My experience is much different with cbc. I can up in 2 to 3 weeks.