Brewing beer isn’t always all beer and skittles, sometimes there is a bit of hard graft involved as well, actually most of it is hard graft, up at 4.30am for a HOBBY!?. It’s the second of Jan, don’t believe the date and time stamped on these posts I can’t seem to get blogger to recognise NZ time, so I have decided to start the year as I mean to go on, with a clean brewery. Caustic rinses for the mash tun, vinegar and elbow grease for the kettles, new beer lines to run between the hopback and the fermenters, new racking lines for cask filling…
First brew of the new year tomorrow, a strong bitter loosely based on Young’s Special London Ale, and perhaps the last to use so-4, yes that’s right, I’m considering a religious conversion, I’m just not sure my house yeast is doing what I want anymore, more on that later.
6 comments:
Wow, no more S-04? I'm just getting great results from it now! I'm too lazy to propagate yeast, and can't afford to buy liquid yeast for every brew.
On the subject of the timestamp... if you edit your profile, there should be a timezone setting. I would assume that follows through into your posts?
We're attempting the conversion from dried to liquid... Just tasted our first lager as we transferred it into secondary fermentation. We used a liquid yeast for that and it's absolutely lovely.
Im still a hardcore dried yeast supporter (homebrew factionalism, awesome) I have just been having alot of trouble with diacetyl recently particulary in low gravity ferments. S-04 drops out so quick I find its leaving alot behind, sometimes resting cleans it up , sometimes not.
That font of wisdom, Mr. Zainasheff, makes possibly the best argument against dried yeast. He points out that the dehydration process is really hard on the cell walls, and leaves a ton of ineffecient and unhealthy yeasty beasties floating around not doing much, or worse, producing bad by-products. This is an excellent reason, but it still works well for me, both cost wise, and perfermonce wise, so I'll keep using it until I win lotto. So, around about next Saturday. ;)
Those reasons dont come anywhere near to tipping the ballance for me. While that may all be true in theory the basic fact remains that very good multi award winning English and New World ales can and are brewed with dried yeast. When you are brewing twice a week, often 48 litre batches and have no interest in mucking about with culturing yeast, dried is best.
The various sources I've consulted on the interweb suggest that for most ales, dried yeast is fine; but then loads of the books seem to swear blind that you really need to get into liquid yeast to start getting into subtle flavours. I think the only way to get a decent answer is to test it, and so for our next batch of IPA, we're going to have a go at doing some with a liquid yeast and some with dried.
We managed to cultivate some yeast from a Youngs Special London Ale once, but unfortunately it didn't work in the actual wort. Nor did the dried stuff though, so I think it was a problem with the wort...
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