The world of beer aficionados is generally divided into two camps; hops heads and malt lovers. This particular part of the world, the Pacific Northwest, is chock full of hop heads and rightly so – Washington State is one of the world’s greatest hop growing regions. But as much as I enjoy drinking an over the top Imperial IPA, I’m not a true hop head. Neither am I a true malt lover – although I can’t image ever turning down a malty Southern Brown Ale. So where does this leave me – will I forever be lost in this state of limbo? No, for I am a yeast lover.
Yeast is such an under-discussed and unappreciated ingredient – without yeast beer would not exist and the world would be worse for it. Beer was brewed without hops for centuries and although beer would not be the same without malted grain, a whole plethora of sugary ingredients are out there just begging to be added into the brewing process, but yeast cannot be replaced or substituted. Baking Powder just will not do in this situation.
Yeast can be a completely neutral ingredient, imparting almost no flavour at all in its creation of alcohol and carbon dioxide, which is desirable in many beer styles. On the opposite side, yeast can create esters, and phenols and many other compounds that add a range of fruit flavours and spicy complexity to beer. Not only can yeast create flavour, but it can also add mouthfeel and can draw out or hide the maltiness of certain beers.
The Belgians are masters at controlling spicy, fruity, sour and almost sweet flavours that yeast can create, Germans have brewing with neutral lager yeast down to a science, the English know how to control malt flavours with yeast, and North Americans have embraced a whole gamut of yeast strains to brew with. Brewers understand the importance of yeast, but that understanding does not make it to the consumer often enough.
Yeast is a living, breathing organism that is responsible for the creation of beer and I think these creatures deserve a little more attention in the world of beer. A knowledgeable beer drinker should be able to determine the different hop varieties in a beer and perhaps even the different malts, but I believe only a select few could determine the style of yeast used to ferment the sweet wort into beer.
My obsession with yeast has grown to new heights. So far I have collected two wild yeast cultures; one for bread and one for brewing my very own authentic West Coast Lambic. The third yeast culture was harvested from my last homebrew and is essentially an IPA flavoured Wyeast 1968 ESB yeast. Instead of brewing with this yeast, I think I will try to make pizza dough with the yeast. Add some heat to the pizza sauce and I would imagine the the pizza would pair perfectly with an IPA – both sharing the same yeast.
Harvested Wyeast ESB Yeast - Wild Yeast for brewing - Wild Sourdough Yeast
Wild Yeast for a Lambic experiment
If you only take away one thing from this post I hope it is this: Yeast creates beer, and without beer where would the world be - would happiness as we know it exist?
Cheers,
Erik
Erik, how did you acquire your wild yeast and have you tried it yet? What style lambic recipe are you going for? A full two year fermentation? Or just a six week to six month fermentation?
To collect the wild yeast I left a 500ml container of wort out on top of my fridge. After a few days a small krausen formed. I let the yeast/wort mixture sit for a few weeks occasionally feeding the yeast dried malt extract to keep it alive and happy.
I am in the middle of brewing a beer with this wild yeast – the recipe is based roughly, key world roughly, on a lambic style. The grist was a mix of two row and wheat. I will most likely let the beer age for six months to a year before bottling.
At this point I have no idea how it will turn out. I will keep you posted.
I’ve been baking bread with a wild yeast for sometime now and personally prefer it over the bread yeast I can buy from the the supermarket. It took over a week before I had the yeast after it went through bacterial phases, but it’s healthy and strong and works well. I use it for my explorations into beer but I don’t have decent beer ingredients and most efforts come out a little sour….so, how do you define the difference, how do you know they are different, how did you collect the different varieties.
I’d love to know more.
It is good to know that I am not the only one experimenting with wild yeast.
When you attempted to brew with wild yeast how long did you let the beer age for – The sourness may develop into other mellower flavours as the beer ages. A wild yeast beer should be sour in comparison to a beer fermented with commercial brewers yeast.
The only way I could confirm that the wild yeast strains I have are different would be to have a lab look at the yeast I have collected. I am making the assumption that wild yeast collected using wheat flour as a propagation medium in December will be different than yeast collected using sweet wort as a propagation medium in April. I could be wrong, but I believe the strains of yeast and bacteria in the air change with the seasons.
I’m only just getting to grain starch conversion, I live in a country that doesn’t have a homebrew market so I can’t get malt extract. I made ginger beer with bought bread yeast which tasted really good, no hint of bread or yeast, and I have made Kvass, a brew made with rye bread or just stale bread. For those I used my own yeast and have had mixed results, but I think that depended on the quality of the bread I was using. I am on the verge of obtaining some real barley, but at the moment I am on my first batch of malting corn, it’s in fermentation right now. It seems to be doing ok.
The wild yeast usually smells pretty smooth almost sweet, so I am hopeful this time round that I might make something nice.
I want to have a go at obtaining yeast from the skin of fruit but it’s the wrong time of year, we’re heading into winter down here. Come summer we should have plenty of fruits to choose from.
I don’t even have hops yet so also experimenting with flavours. It’s a tough call. I’ve done a load of research and reading on the net and I am getting there. The thing about yeast though is it adapts to its food source. One thing I did wrong was to shake my brews to encourage activity. I learnt over the last few days that this encourages yeast reproduction and you obtain less alcohol. Also it’s likely to lead to autolysis which in itself is going to produce a sour flavour I believe.
The ginger beer and kvass didn’t need to be aged they can be drunk green, it’s early days for me though, so the next batch I intend to give atleast 3 weeks from bottling to tasting.
Erik, how did your beer turn out? I’m thinking of harvesting my own wild yeast for brewing and would love to hear your experience with it.
I will be bottling the beer in the next few weeks. I let this one age quite a while trying to emulate a traditional lambic. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
I have been experimenting too. I am finding there are a lot of different techniques to capture yeast. One of the ways to do it, which I tried first, was to “wash” the yeast from my primary fermenter. I had brewed with Wyeast Yorkshire yeast, which is seasonal, you can only get it a few months of the year, usually in October. I love this yeast, so I wanted it to last all year for brewing. So after the primary fermentation, after siphoning out to my Cornelius keg, I took the sludge and poured about a gallon of (already boiled) cold water in there, shook it up, and poured the cloudy stuff back into the jar that held the water. Then it started to separate, and I waited until the morning to find a thin whitish layer of yeast, just underneath the watery layer.
The key is to capture that white layer, which is the yeast, and pour it into three or four sanitized quart jars and put them in the fridge until I am ready to brew and use them. There are videos on the internets.
The first time I did this, I sort of screwed up because I didn’t understand that the yeast was the white layer – at the time it looked like it was the white and the lower level sludgy stuff just below it. Now I know.
Anyway, I brewed an English type of brew and pitched this washed yeast. I should have created a starter, because nothing happened for 3-4 days, and then I panicked and put in a second jar of my newly washed yeast. After a few more days it started, but the interesting thing about this was that the fermentation seemed very different than the original Yorkshire yeast. I am thinking that some wild yeast entered the primary during my fumbling about.
I ended up kegging the beer, and early tasting suggested a bit of a sour taste, but very drinkable. Definitely different than the Yorkshire batch. It did improve with time, rounding off nicely.
We have this, what we call, “slayer-strength” wild sourdough yeast that we use for bread, and the plan is to capture the yeast out of this and create a starter for beer.
The new book, Tartine Bread, from the bread maker in San Francisco (Tartine Bakery) was my inspiration to seek out and investigate cross-yeasting experimentation. A hundred years ago beer was made from wild yeast that was carefully propagated. Why not now?
Erik, how did your lambic turn out? If you remember, I realise that was almost 2 yrs ago. This is a VERY interesting topic and one that is under explored. I’m interested to hear how your lambic yeast has developed/changed over time. Good post and great site!
It is still aging. Last I checked it was overly acidic for what a lambic should be. I plan on blending it with a young beer in the style of an oude bruin. I’ll keep you posted.
Erik, It has been 3 years since you started this project. I would love to see/hear of your finished product! Keep up the good work and PATIENCE!