Crossing Yeast Strains

[Kai]

Nice work Brewer Pete. I am actually a qualified Biologist (otherwise employed).
I would say that the breeding and culture of brewing yeast is too difficult for your average home brewer.
How are you going to test all these yeasts once you have created and isolated and cultured them up to working strength?
A series of identical small brews from a single large batch, stored in separate 1-5 litre conicals in an isolated fridge?
How do you plan to test them? Double blind tests with a professional tasting panel?
It gets bigger and better and much more complex.

I'd actually disagree with you there, for the average home brewer I think the culturing and isolating part is the complex one; not a lot of brewers are fancy enough to maintain pure cultures.

Testing the yeast, obviously depends on exactly what you're after but I think it would indeed be as fundamental as isolating a few cultures (which I propose is the relatively difficult part) and selecting your personal preference based on fermentation performance and flavour profile. You'd just need a lot of patience to get it all done. I'd be buggered if I'd ever bother...

 

[manticle]

out of interest...

If you were making a really high alcohol beer with lots of malt - could you add a mixture of wine and ale yeasts to achieve the higher alcohol content but retain some of the characteristics of a particular ale yeast?

If so would you mix them both at start of fermentation or would you add the ale yeast in primary then transfer off the yeast to secondary fermenter and add wine yeast?

Thanks

Wine yeasts ferment very dry.

I tried a wine yeast once in a pale/golden ale. Originally fermented with and ale yeast, wine yeast added around 1020. It stripped back the character of everything bar the dry hop I did (which was way too grassy) and I wouldn't go down this road again. I'd use wine yeast for cider or wine but leave it out of beer. There are some pretty highly alc-tolerant ale yeasts though.
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