How to substitute liquid yeast in recipe

I'm starting out on homebrew beers, made some all-grain recipes already and I want to try some new recipes, but, where I live is very difficult to find liquid yeast, and almost all recipes (mainly on beersmith) uses liquid yeast.

What should I look into the yeast to find a good dry yeast substitute to the liquid one in the recipe?

Topic recipe-formulation dry-yeast yeast beer homebrew

Category Mac


In general, liquid yeast shouldn't be used without making a starter to get the cell count up (and the second generation will have thicker walls). Yeast vials are notorious for having low cell counts. If I lived in an area where yeast is hard to come by, I would exclusively use dry yeast.

The reality is that all ale yeast is Saccharomyces cerevisiae (lager yeast is a different species but the same genus). What else is Saccharomyces cerevisiae? bread yeast. I'm not saying that you should use leavening yeast to ferment your beer but if you reserved some wort from a pale ale and added some baking yeast, washed the yeast and did it again, by the third or fourth generation, you'd have something very similar to American Ale yeast. You could do a little experimenting to see what happens.


Ignore yeast in the recipe. If you can't get it, you can't get it. Look for dry yeast that meet what you need:

  • Most yeast have "good for" style list. Choose one that's good for your style.
  • Alcohol tolerance must be equal or higher than you expect in your beer.
  • Temperature range you can actually get.

With these three, you should get good enough results. For most precise results, you can also try to match flocculation and attenuation with suggested yeast, but that's optional - and probably these will already match, because they depend on style.

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