On Mon, Jun 13, 2005 at 09:31:45PM +0200, Heikki Levanto wrote: > You should never do that! You can't bake a decent bagel with a > bottom-fermenting yeast! Any bakers apprentice could tell you that!
We had a guy come in to NB a couple weeks back asking for some beer yeast for his bread, I gave him the same spiel as below ;) > Seriously, most baking yeast is a byproduct of spirit manufacture, so it > is probably optimised for a quick and effective fermentation, never mind > the taste, as that will be distilled away anyway. I have experimented > with it once, and got a decent but very uninteresting beer out of it. It's funny, because I was reading about danish mead and it seems most people actually use bakers yeast, even though there IS plenty of good dry wine strains. > In a way you are right, the more serious brewers tend to use liquid > yeasts. The dry ones do have their uses too. They are easy to handle, > even a beginner can get it right. They don't need to be smacked, rolled, > prepared, started, and cultivated in advance of brewing, and in reducing > infection risks, nothing is safer than dumping a pack directly in the > wort. Admittedly some of them are less interesting than the best of the > "wet" yeasts, but so what? Often you want the yeast to take a back seat, > and let other ingredients carry most of the weight. I've actually used dry yeast a couple times. What I remember was a pack of nottingham ale yeast for my lambic to feed on about 8-9 months ago. Oh, and this weekend we made 30 gallons of american pale ale in front of NB where we experimented with 1056 / Safale US56. So I will =actually= have a dry yeast beer on tap in a few weeks. > The liquid yeasts really shine on the variety and selection, but it is > not always you need all that - most beers are made with one yeast > anyway. Only very experiencec brewers (Mr. Eibner for example) can know > the idiosyncracies of all the liquid ones. We mere mortals are often > better served by learning a few easy dry yeasts, and using them with the > full knowledge of their potential and their limits. And just because you're experienced doesn't mean you "just" know which yeast to use, that's why we make big batches and experiment with different strains. Sometimes the difference is very subtle other times it hits you that there is a huge difference. A friend and I made a 30 gallon batch of dark belgian strong and fermented 5 gallons of each with same size starter of: Wyeast Ardennes Wyeast Belgian Strong Wyeast Abbey II Wyeast Abbey Wyeast Trappist High Gravity Whitelabs Bastogne (Orval strain) Surprisingly Belgian Strong, Abbey, and Trappist were almost undrinkable compared to Ardennes,Abbey II, and Bastogne. We didn't have the dry strain of "belgian" yeast in there, 'cause it wasn't out yet. But we did have 2 gallons leftover that we pitched with 1056, it is to this day still undrinkable. Thomas
