Recent content by bestbuds

I'm a rep of Escarpment Labs (founder) and was asked to provide some help here. I started my career in beer as a homebrewer (with the homebrewtalk account to prove it) and I remember having many questions about yeast behaviour and wondering whether what I was seeing was correct. I'll break...

Pitching yeast after EC1118 might present an issue: EC1118 is a "killer" yeast, producing a toxin that many other, non "killer" yeasts are susceptible to. This includes the vast majority of ale yeasts such as WLP099. Is WLP099 now fermenting in the beer itself, or just in the starter?

What happened here is you likely selected for less attenuative members of the population by only pitching the yeast that settled first. High flocculation is typically correlated with lower attenuation. The yeasts still in solution that you dumped are also the yeasts more likely to stay in...

I'm not sure how much of a temperature differential that will create - but if you have external temperature control you will be regulating the internal fermentation temperature fairly well, so placing the probe between the carboys seems reasonable to me.

Autolysis also results in the release of nitrogenous compounds (mannoproteins and amino acids) which could be used by Brett as nutrients. For what it's worth I've pulled viable Saccharomyces out of bottled beer more than one year old, but never more than two. That said, survival/autolytic...

If you are testing pitching rate's influence on ester production, I would oxygenate the beers equally - as it stands your experimental design includes two variables: pitching rate and oxygenation level. Both of these are going to have an impact on yeast health and flavor compound production, so...

I usually do this for sampling from 1 gallon carboys. No problems thus far and likely less of a contamination issue than taking several samples with a thief!

Candida is a big genus. Kind of like how there are species of Saccharomyces that are pathogens in certain circumstances (eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccharomyces_kluyveri). Candida humilis shows up as the dominant yeast in sourdoughs typically, but you'll also see populations of...

I'm a big fan!

Are you using a counterflow or plate chiller?

I would cut out the melanoidin, as that will probably add too much maltiness when you've already got a healthy dose of Munich. You'll get sweetness from the honey malt as well. I just did an American red with the same amount of roasted barley and got a beautiful red coloured wort, for what it's...

I brewed this three weeks ago, with 15% oats at your recommendation. Bottled on Sunday. The aroma of this is incredible, juicy citrus. I used Conan so it's got that apricot/peach thing in the background as well. Perfect recipe.

I don't think that introducing an intermediate step (starter) between the vial and the beer is going to cause an extreme shift in the strain ratio. Furthermore, being in beer will also place selection pressure on the culture such that certain strains/species will thrive under different...

Just bottled an American Wheat/Rye fermented with C3. The brett character combined with dry hops (ahtanum and motueka) to produce a complex, mango forward tropical aroma with underlying funk. These are really interesting yeasts.

I did a Berliner Weisse very recently in a very similar manner. I also got a lot of butyric acid as well, but a lot was scrubbed out by the boil. There is certainly some left over, which I was planning on cleaning up with Brett in secondary. For a beer that small, FG with Brett could go a bit...