Mixing yeast for creating different profiles

[thehaze]

Hello there,


I am unsure if this is stupid or maybe irrelevant or or impossible to achieve, but lately I have been thinking a lot about mixing different yeast for creating a slightly different final beer.

I am planning on brewing some belgian beers.

One of those will be a saison, which I want to ferment using the new BE-134 from Fermentis and maybe add a bit of WitBier yeast or wheat yeast ( even K-97 as it is clean yeast, low esters, but it is powdery - to create haze? ), to balance the profile with banana, vanilla and fruit esters. ( if possible )

I am thinking on keeping the grain bill simple, using Pilsner, Flaked wheat, ( maybe some CaraPils or Flaked oats ) and sugar ( dextrose ).

My plan is to mash high ( 154-155F / 68C ), ferment warm. Pitch an even amount of saison and witbier yeast or slightly more witbier yeast in the first day or two and then add more saison yeast to completely ferment the wort.

My thoughts ( perhaps a bit off-course or stupid? ) are to achieve a bright, hazy, soft, mellow profile in the finish beer, with an elevated alcohol content ( somewhere between 7-9% ), intense dry hopping and should/could provide me to be highly drinkable.

A balanced water profile or maybe leaning a bit more towards a higher chloride ratio, using hops like Hallertau Blanc, Nelson Sauvin, El Dorado and Azacca, for that winey, fruitty and slighly juicy taste.

I am still in the process of figuring every aspect of it and am pretty enthusiastic about it.

I love belgian beer and I am highly intrigued by the thread around Tree House profile, which gave me inspiration for wanting to try this out.

I would like this to revolve around dry yeast, which is easier to store, cheaper, but of course has some downfalls, like the lack of variety.

ANY thoughts, critique, feedback is more than welcome, along with personal experience or any other information you could provide. I am sure this is something which could turn out to be either pretty good or pretty bad, but am determined to at least try a few batches.

 

[MizzouFermentationScience]

Not a stupid idea per se, I commend your desire to add complexity and achieve a unique flavor. I don't have experience with using different yeast in beer, but here's my thoughts from my experience. First of all, yeast are competitive little bastards. They produce kill factors (kf1, kf2, etc...) that induce autolysis in "sensitive" yeast they are competing against. Also, some strains will just plain out compete all the others in a certain enviroment. In wine, it is not uncommon to have an inoculated tank switch dominate strains part way through fermentation- billions of commercial cells get beat out by a few stray cells in the winery that land in the tank. With that said, another common method in the wine industry is to inoculate with a blend heterofermentative yeasts that don't survive past ~4% alcohol along with standard saccharomyces cerevisea to add complexity early in the fermentation.

I would research the specific strains you'd like to use to see if they have kill factors and/or are sensitive. Ideally you could find a combo of yeast 1 being sensitive, then pitch a killer yeast halfway through fermentation. If such a combo doesn't exist, you may be able to cold crash, rack and restart with a new yeast. I would take extra care in rehydrating and acclimitizing the second yeast to give them a fighting chance. if you want to experiment with hanseniospora, klockera, and candida- there is a commercial strain called melody that you could play with alongside S.c.

 

[couchsending]

I was under the impression that all brewing yeasts were “sensitive” or “susceptible” and that there were no “killer” brewing yeasts, only wine yeasts were killer.

That being said, even adding 1g of WB-06 to 11g of S-04 at the start of ferment produced a shockingly high number of phenols.

I’m all about blending and have done a bunch of it. There are tons of pro brewers that blend Saison strains. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard of guys adding 10-20% 3711 to the DuPont strain. Flavor profile of DuPont with quick attenuation of French and maybe even the added mouthfeel benefit of the French yeast’s glycerol production.

I think you’re going to have to do some experiments but that’s half the fun. Messing with percentages, pitch rates, temps, adding blends at beginning, end, etc. its a bit of a rabbit hole but it can be lots of fun. There’s a great White Labs Belgian Yeast chart that lists different profiles at three different temp ranges. Check it out if you haven’t. Just bought some 410 and going to try it fermented around 60 to see how clean I can get it.