Selecting yeasts

Question

Selecting yeasts

Andrew Wyld

2014年8月4日 15:02

As I understand it, the selection of malt (and adjunct), hops and yeast all affect the flavour of a beer in important ways. However, while you can taste the malt and other grains to get a feel for what flavour they will give to the beer, and you can smell hops to get a feel for flavour and aroma (and use alpha acid level as an indicator for the bittering hops), I can't see a good way to get an intuitive feel for the effect of different yeasts.

If there were only two or three yeasts, this would be fine: I could just try them all on some kind of reference mash. However, there seem to be hundreds.

So: firstly, other than the obvious (like top fermenting vs bottom fermenting), is there a standard way of categorising yeasts? I'm mainly interested in ale yeast at the moment, but broadly curious about the whole range of yeasts.

Secondly, is there a good way to get an intuitive feel for which yeast to choose for a particular job? At the moment I feel as though my technique is "pick the yeast whose name sounds closest to the beer I'm trying to make", which is obviously pretty terrible. Any and all advice gratefully received.

Topic yeast-cultures yeast homebrew

Category Mac

Atron Seige · Accepted Answer · 2014年8月4日 15:02

Yeast is usually categorised by how well they flocculate, the esters and phenols they release and the attenuation you can expect.

A "standard" American yeast (US05) is descibed as "clean", whereas your "standard" British yeast (S04) is described as fruity. Your weiss yeasts would be very fruity with high banana and spicy with clove. A lager yeast might be identifiable by the amount of sulphur that it releases.

The Fermentis Site has product sheets that explain aromas, flavours, etc.

I have never worked with liquid yeast (not cost effective to ship in), but I am sure that White Labs, Wyeast has areas on their sites where they explain the details of each strain.

Lasty: Experience. Brew many beers.

Cheers

jsled · Accepted Answer · 2014年7月21日 23:42

Most of the yeasts have both qualitative and quantitative notes that describe the flavor profile and other characteristics (flocculation/clarity, attenuation, temperature effects, &c.)

The YeastBot Database is an attempt to centralize some of this information.

I usually try to find a yeast that's in the same sort of family as the style I'm trying to make, but then look for qualitative descriptors that match what I want out of the beer. For instance, a recent stout was subtly enhanced by the fruitiness/nuttiness of WY1099, and a schwarzbier I've done in the past came out much nicer with WY2206 vs. WY2124.

Splitting a single batch into two different pitches can also help you see the differences due just to yeast side-by-side; it's a bit easier to do splitting a 10gl batch into 5gl splits, but nothing says you can't split a 5 or 6gl batch into two primary carboys.

Selecting yeasts

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