# Talkin' yeast!



## TimT (7/2/14)

Let's talk yeast! This summer I've got a certain beer in mind, a honey porter with blackberries added in at secondary ferment. Because it's got honey, I'm looking at a reasonably long ferment; because it's summer, and warm, and I'm only able to ferment at ambient temperatures, I'm looking at a tolerant yeast that will be able to adapt to conditions.

I was thinking fermenting over a saison yeast, since I've been brewing saisons at the moment anyway, I have some yeast still in the fridge, and I don't like to leave it lying around. But are saison yeasts really intended for beers with a sizeable portion of wheat? And how would they cope if, say, Melbourne decided to have a drastic drop in temperatures and have a longish run of cool days (Melbourne weather is changeable like that). General advice in fermenting is to raise the temperatures gradually to keep the yeast happy - not to drop them. 

And if not saison yeast - then what? Also in the fridge I have some English ale yeast, spot of lager yeast, a smattering of wine yeasts, and maybe a leftover or two of wheat beer yeasts. (All dry yeasts). Normally I'd just use the ale yeast for a porter, but 1) I want to try to ferment this one for quite a while and, 2) I want to branch out in my yeast use anyway to give my beers more complexity and better aroma and flavour.


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## mje1980 (7/2/14)

Wheat should not be a problem, nor the temp drop, just warm it up. Especially for a saison yeast, that'll eat your fermentor if it wants to.Your beers certainly aren't lacking in complexity, in fact they seem to be overly complex IMHO.


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## TimT (7/2/14)

Some of the days in Melbourne at the moment are pretty nuts - outside temps of 35-40, meaning inside temps hitting peaks of around 30 or above. Not comfortable for me, or for yeast. I may have to wait until the weather is more sane. I may have created some confusion in my initial post though - I normally use my saison yeast for beers with wheat; I was wondering whether it would adapt happily to a beer with no wheat (just malt, honey, a small amount of fruit).

I love the way the rich malty sweetness of dark porters and other beers are able to carry sweet flavours; I think blackberry and honey added are not too complex on their own, and should give the final beer an interesting texture and flavour.

Mind you you should see the nutso honey beer I bottled a few weeks ago - a wheat beer, though aside from wheat I also added Munich malt, chocolate malt, and of course honey. Fermented for ages (slowly). Bottled it about two weeks ago and primed the bottles - the yeast loved it and now it's super-carbonated. So it's got some wheat beer flavours, some red ale flavours, and some honey qualities as well. I think I'll just drink some soon and chuck a lot of it in the fridge so I don't have any explosive fun times.


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## brewtas (7/2/14)

mje1980 is spot on about the saison yeast and for the moment, it's your best bet. Actually, I read somewhere that WY3725 can even ferment lactose. Crazy stuff.



TimT said:


> 2) I want to branch out in my yeast use anyway to give my beers more complexity and better aroma and flavour.


I think your issue here is that you want yeast to do what you're not going to be able to do without temp control unless you wait until the weather is cooler.


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## manticle (7/2/14)

Wheat's fine, no wheat's also fine. It's only the belgian saison that stalls below 28-30 so if you're using 3711 or something similar, I wouldn't worry.

This time of year at ambient, saison's about all you can use, rest of the year in melbourne, you can get within a beesdick with water baths.


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## TimT (7/2/14)

Yep - my original plan was not to brew over summer. Oh ho ho ho, how naive I was.

However, I am interested this year in brewing with longer-acting yeasts, beers with longer brew times, and yeasts that really bring out some interesting flavours and give the beer interesting character.


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## MartinOC (7/2/14)

Slightly :icon_offtopic: My experience with blackberries is that they ferment-out absolutely bone dry & don't really impart much of a blackberry flavour unless you use a swag of them. Nice-sounding experiment, 'though


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## brewtas (7/2/14)

What do you mean by longer acting yeasts, Tim? The only ones that generally take longer than a week or two are funky or sour beers where the brettanomyces or bacteria slowly work over months-years.


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## TimT (7/2/14)

Well. Wines take longer to ferment for one thing. Candi beers (I've heard, though I haven't made any) take months to fully ferment. Honey beer definitely does, though the ferment slows after the first week or so - because of the complexity of honey. I think it's the fructose that really gives the yeast trouble.


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## brewtas (7/2/14)

As far as I'm aware, most of those don't so much take a long time to ferment as potentially take time to clean up after fermentation. Fructose is a simple sugar, not a challenge for yeast at all.


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## mje1980 (7/2/14)

brewtas said:


> mje1980 is spot on about the saison yeast and for the moment, it's your best bet. Actually, I read somewhere that WY3725 can even ferment lactose. Crazy stuff.
> 
> 
> 
> I think your issue here is that you want yeast to do what you're not going to be able to do without temp control unless you wait until the weather is cooler.



Wy 3725 is s beautiful year IMHO, great farmhouse, loves it hot, and in my experience throws a musty, cellar type aroma I the finished beer. Weird but wonderful. Great for saison too.


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## TimT (7/2/14)

Well honey does take longer to ferment which you can observe in the fermentation of simple meads - it peaks fairly quickly, then will ferment rapidly for a few weeks, then may spend months slowly fermenting. I just double checked the reference work I have at my desk - Buhner's book 'Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers' - and it says the sugar yeast takes longest on is fructose.

But it's true, I shouldn't mix up the ageing of beers and wines with the fermentation. Just a bit hard to tell where one begins and the other ends!


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## brewtas (7/2/14)

mje1980 said:


> Wy 3725 is s beautiful year IMHO, great farmhouse, loves it hot, and in my experience throws a musty, cellar type aroma I the finished beer. Weird but wonderful. Great for saison too.


Totally. It's my favourite yeast for Saisons and it's an absolute monster. I've enjoyed following your adventures in Saison on the forum over the last few months. :beerbang: 



TimT said:


> Well honey does take longer to ferment which you can observe in the fermentation of simple meads - it peaks fairly quickly, then will ferment rapidly for a few weeks, then may spend months slowly fermenting. I just double checked the reference work I have at my desk - Buhner's book 'Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers' - and it says the sugar yeast takes longest on is fructose.
> 
> But it's true, I shouldn't mix up the ageing of beers and wines with the fermentation. Just a bit hard to tell where one begins and the other ends!


Honey on its own takes longer to ferment but there are other issues there and that's not what you're talking about. A beer with some honey in it should ferment out relatively quickly and completely because the sugars are so simple. 

Re: aging, most beers don't really need to be aged if they're brewed properly. Even lots of the big ones should be pretty good within a few weeks of brewing if the yeast and fermentation side of things is properly managed. Ageing an Imperial Stout or Barleywine can do nice things but if it isn't good to drink early on then it's because not enough yeast was pitched or it was fermented too warm or not oxygenated sufficiently. There's no reason the Porter you're talking about should take longer than 2-3 weeks depending on when you add the blackberries and honey.

It sounds like an interesting beer though. Keep us posted when you brew it.


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## TimT (7/2/14)

Well I admit I've usually been happy to let my honey brews leisurely ferment and produce carbon dioixide without really measuring the sugar level at intervals to see what, if anything, has changed. Perhaps there is a point about (taking a stab in the dark here) three-four weeks(?) when, even though carbon dioxide will still continue escaping through the airlock, the rate will be so slow - and the change from sugar to alcohol will be so negligible - that it can be considered finished? (Certainly Buhner, when talking about honey fermentation, gives, I think, 12-16 weeks as the time it takes for honey to fully ferment.)

It sounds like a saison yeast in this weather is probably the best choice anyway. This year I'd certainly like to get a better idea of the yeasts available, since from my very limited reading it sounds like they do make important differences to the final product. So recommendations are always helpful! (On that note, thanks for the Wy3725, mje1980 and Brewtas!)

Perhaps I should even consider having a house yeast, like my house yoghurt/cheese culture. If so it would probably have to be a pretty versatile yeast since I don't think I could keep track of a number of different yeast strains, so one would have to do for the lot!

That leads to a related question though (and please bear with me here): yoghurt cultures (bacteria) often tend to die out after a few generations - because the commercial cultures that you normally start from are made from a single bacteria cell that has been multiplied in the lab, and they lack the diversity to survive for longer than about ten generations. By contrast traditional yoghurt and cheese cultures - wild cultures, if you like - are essentially immortal; they are much more diverse and can be recultured indefinitely.

I wonder if an analogy holds with yeast? I've read varying opinions about re-using yeast from previous beers - some are of the opinion it can't or shouldn't be done because the yeast will become useless after a few regenerations anyway; others say it can be done (because, well, they've done it). But the vast majority of commercial yeasts would have been, essentially, multiplied in a lab anyway, yes? So wouldn't this tend to inhibit their diversity? Wouldn't the most durable yeast cultures tend to be wild yeasts (more natural diversity) or traditional yeasts which have always been used in family brews?

(Realise I'm going off topic here, but it's my own thread, so I'm modifying the topic, dammit!)


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## philmud (10/2/14)

The consensus seems to be that recultured yeasts are good for a finite number of generations (and are in fact sometimes better after two or so) and after that they suffer from undesirable mutations. Whether this is because they were originally cultured in such a precise way I'm not sure but I suppose its logical that a yeast strain that is allowed to adapt will become more resilient. Whether this resilience results in characteristics that lead to a more pleasing beer, I'm inclined to doubt, or at least if it does, it's a happy coincidence.

I've read "Sacred and Healing Herbal Beers" and I kind of baulk at the methods of cultivating wild yeast that he seems to advocate. For instance, resting a stick in your wort as it ferments, and then drying it to retain the yeast strain. It sounds like a crude method that may have been partly effective for cultures that didn't have Wyeast, but not like something that would be conducive to the best most repeatable beer I can make at home.

I will say though, there's a certain romance in the idea of cultivating a wild yeast that makes your beer truly unique. Wild yeast experimentation could be rewarding, and if you were able to produce consistently good, repeatable beer you would be a popular man in the zombie apocalypse.


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## TimT (11/2/14)

Some folks on this forum have kept yeast cultures going for years, I hear, and insist there's no diminishment in quality. Buhner also recommends calling on the local yeast Gods while doing stuff with your yeast stick! And indeed I have a yeast stick sitting in my study, though I will leave it up to Buhner to call on the spirits. It's mainly because I want to have my study (where I ferment) a yeasty place, and for stirring.

I'm sure it's quite possible to keep yeast going though. People have been doing it for many generations - we know the traditional methods for keeping a strain going: use a fresh ale as a starter, take a scoop off the krausen, or just leave one unfermented wort sit close by a wort with an active yeast. All pretty simple.


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## mje1980 (11/2/14)

Mate, the wild cultures you buy from a lab in a sterile pack are unpredictable enough. Letting nature take its course may not be as romantic when you're chundering down the porcelain bowl


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## TimT (11/2/14)

The idea of re-buying cheese culture used to annoy me too - why? When surely you could just keep cheese culture going indefinitely as other families have done? What's the point of a culture that benefits factories and distributors but doesn't benefit people making cheese at home, in fact, becomes an ongoing expense to them? So eventually I got a heirloom culture and it works a treat.

Same seems to hold true of yeast. It would be good to keep a strain going indefinitely. Best of all would be to cultivate a strain that a family have kept going for generations - because you'd know that people have relied on that strain to make consistent beer. And it would really be part of a tradition, and I like all that shit, man.


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## Yob (11/2/14)

if you are sterile, keeping slants or freezing yeast samples is a great way to go, always reculturing from a known sample. Ive recently started freezing yeast and my first one took with no issues. (I'll never be without Greenbelt again :beerbang: )

Ive been to a brewery in Ireland that repitched a wheat yeast 128 times, (Franciscan Well - Cork) I dunno when/if he has reset it, but it went from batch to batch, if fermenting the same style of beer and sanitation is up to scratch, you can keep them going for years without issue.


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## philmud (11/2/14)

TimT said:


> Some folks on this forum have kept yeast cultures going for years, I hear, and insist there's no diminishment in quality. Buhner also recommends calling on the local yeast Gods while doing stuff with your yeast stick! And indeed I have a yeast stick sitting in my study, though I will leave it up to Buhner to call on the spirits. It's mainly because I want to have my study (where I ferment) a yeasty place, and for stirring.
> 
> I'm sure it's quite possible to keep yeast going though. People have been doing it for many generations - we know the traditional methods for keeping a strain going: use a fresh ale as a starter, take a scoop off the krausen, or just leave one unfermented wort sit close by a wort with an active yeast. All pretty simple.


I'm not doubting that it's possible, but I'd suggest that the reasons it used to be done are largely obsolete now that we have ready access to cheap, excellent yeasts. I split my liquid yeasts and have re cultured Coopers before - I'm all for stretching out the lifespan if a yeast, but I think my beer will be better for it if I refresh the gene pool on a regular basis.

A saison I brewed the day my nephew was born was a cracker made with 3711. I didn't split that pack and decided to reculture some yeast from a bottle with the notion of maintaining this yeast for sentimental reasons. The next saison was just ok - the yeast perhaps not in great shape due to being recultured from a bottle of 6% abv beer that was stored in a hot room. I won't use this strain again because I don't think it'll make a beer as good as the first (due to my handling, no doubt). Anyway, YMMV, and probably will if you treat your yeast with a bit more tenderness.

Edit: I will use 3711 again, just not this recultured "family" of it.


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## lukiferj (11/2/14)

Yob said:


> Ive been to a brewery in Ireland that repitched a wheat yeast 128 times, (Franciscan Well - Cork) I dunno when/if he has reset it, but it went from batch to batch, if fermenting the same style of beer and sanitation is up to scratch, you can keep them going for years without issue.


I'm just pitched a 10th generation Notto yeast last night. Mostly just to see how long I can keep it going. Beer still tastes good and yeast is attenuating and dropping as expected. I normally keep a yeast for 3 or 4 gens but this one just keeps going. Nothing to do with cost or availability, I just cant see any why I would throw it out if it's still working well. Has been used in a number of different styles of beer including a stout, porter, brown ale and faux lagers.


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## fletcher (11/2/14)

i read the title of this thread the wrong way!



sorry, i know this is off topic! kinda...


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## TimT (11/2/14)

I love it, Fletch!

I've been known to make similar 'mistakes'....


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## TimT (11/2/14)

Splitting yeast and re-using it in several different beers seems one good guarantee of future survival: there's more chance that a few of these second generation yeast strains will be exceptionally strong. And, if necessary, you can select among the yeast varieties you cultivate for various qualities.


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## TimT (11/2/14)

Wouldn't be surprised if the issues in keeping a healthy and active yeast culture going were the same as with keeping a healthy and active bacterial culture. The yeast strain needs some natural diversity: makes it more resistant to outside infection. It needs to be self-sustaining - create the conditions for its future survival. (So, help to maintain the pH at an acceptable level, create nutrients for itself, etc); again, the best guarantee of this seems to be diversity. Cleanliness is important too, though that being said, given that yeast gets some nutrients from dead yeast cells, and in a traditional setting old pots could be used again and again, often it may have been the lack of sterility that helped keep the yeast going.


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## brouhaha (11/2/14)

So I have a question about yeast preservations/cultivation...

A couple of weeks back I bottled a 3724 saison. I ended up pitching some US-05 to re-engage the fermentation after it stuck at 1.030 for a month. The beer tastes good, maybe a little too fruity, but very drinkable. When I bottled I saved and washed the yeast cake and it's currently in the fridge. I was going to pitch it into another saison but I'm not really sure what to expect from the yeast blend. Will it be some kind of 3724/US-05 super strain? or will the americans have consumed their belgian cousins and left me with boring old US-05?


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## TimT (11/2/14)

Brouhaha, I suspect the US will be dominant now. Dunno there. Maybe there is a way of reviving the Saison yeast?


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## brouhaha (11/2/14)

TimT, I was thinking that maybe I'll do a slightly larger batch and ferment 1 or 2 litres of it with some of the 3724/US-05 mutant strain rather than risking an entire batch. If it's good I can do a larger batch later on.

Experimenting with yeast is fun, up until recently, I hadn't really put much thought into the yeast, but the warmer weather has really demonstrated just how much impact it can have on your beer.


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## TimT (11/2/14)

Speaking of wild yeast, we should really get around to making a sourdough starter this summer. It's the time for it.

I recently saw two interesting episodes of Brewing TV relating to discussions re: wild yeast and just keeping yeast happy in general. This one, on open fermentation - makes for more interesting beers, apparently, because an open fermentation will have more esters produced - and this one, on an attempt at wild yeast cultivation. Entertaining and (gasp!) educational.

I have read that even if a ferment starts with several yeasts present, only one yeast strain will dominate in the end - which would suggest that the US-05, simply by virtue of being there at the end (if not the start) - will probably be the dominant strain from now on. However, seek more information. I'm no expert!


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## brouhaha (11/2/14)

I also recently watched those 2 episodes of Brewing TV. That yeast dude is awesome, I love his approach to brewing. He has a really solid understanding of the process and that allows him to experiment with things that most people would consider a bit mental. 

Yeah I've heard a similar thing, I think I'll just toss the 3724/US-05 and buy some fresh 3724 hopefully this time it gets through on it's own and I can harvest it at the end.


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## mje1980 (11/2/14)

brouhaha said:


> I also recently watched those 2 episodes of Brewing TV. That yeast dude is awesome, I love his approach to brewing. He has a really solid understanding of the process and that allows him to experiment with things that most people would consider a bit mental.
> 
> Yeah I've heard a similar thing, I think I'll just toss the 3724/US-05 and buy some fresh 3724 hopefully this time it gets through on it's own and I can harvest it at the end.


When it stalls just heat the crap out if it, like 30-35c. It'll eventually finish. Renowned slow finisher, but lovely yeast.


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