I know its been asked before, maybe not in this way. Dry vs liquid

[swem]

Ordered some stuff from Austin home brew and long story short ended up with two frozen vials that didn't make it. THEY WERE NICE ENOUGH TO SEND ME REPLACEMENTS (dry this time) Tried a starter but no go. The one major pro of liquid is the number of available strains. It's not even close though I have been seeing a lot of new dry yeasts. I know that a lot of yeasts can't make it through the process of dehydration and that's why there isn't as many strains. My main question is this. Can dry be on par for say a pale ale or ipa for conversations sake. Also after you use it, then repitch the yeast how is it any different from the liquid yeast it was taken from. For example I think that safale 05 is the strain that Sierra Nevada uses for a lot of their beers, by the second or third pitch, why isn't it then as good as the original liquid, is something lost in the process??

 

[mozart4898]

You'll find many people who swear by dry yeasts for the specific styles you've mentioned (APA, IPA). I don't have any actual statistical data for this, but I'd go as far as guessing that nearly 50% of homebrewers making these styles use US-05. (I haven't made a ton of batches but I don't think I've ever made a pale ale/IPA with anything other than a dry yeast.) Maybe that's on the high side, but it's very common and very successful. Others use Nottingham and S-04.

As far as how the dried strains are different than the liquid ones - I'd say there's probably little difference with ale yeasts...at first. (As I understand it, the few dried lager yeasts available may not be quite comparable to their alleged liquid counterparts.) Over a couple of generations (pitches) however, variables do get introduced. These include differences in fermentation temperature, the specifics of the wort, etc. and my guess would be after a couple generations it's probably not uncommon to find some mutations (Darwinism at work in your beer, basically - it's the survival of the fittest in there). But hey, you could consider those "house character." If the beer's good and there's no infections, there's no reason to not continue using a yeast for a number of generations if you desire. Note that if such mutations occur, they should occur whether you started with a dry or liquid yeast.

 

[MedicMang]

Everything said up above is true. I love dry yeast. I usually keep a couple packets on hand as an emergency stash or for ciders. Nottingham is great for making sweet/carbonated cider.

The yeast mutations usually start after about the 3-5 generation. I have kinda bipassed this by making a starter that is 1L extra and saving that liter of starter in a sanitized ball jar and pitching the rest into the beer. Next time you want to use that strain, make the starter out of the jar from last time and repeat the process of making an extra liter. This way it stays as pure as possible and won't need to be "washed" of all of the junk from fermentation. If you want to go crazy with it; after the liter has settled in the fridge, decant the liquid, boil and cool some water and throw it in the jar. Shake it up and bam. Super clean yeast for next time. This is kind of how white labs does it from what I've heard.

 

[corax]

There should be very little difference between dry and liquid as far as re-pitching goes.

People are always going on and on about accumulated mutations with re-pitching. While there may be some of that, accumulated contamination is a much more likely source of batch-to-batch degradation. 5 successive batches is not that many generations.

 

[BigFloyd]

If you pitch dry (hopefully rehydrated first) into a batch and then harvest the slurry to use later, you treat it just like a liquid yeast for future pitches (aeration of wort, etc).

For the Pale/IPA you're talking about, dry yeast is an excellent option. Lot's of folks use US-05 (same Chico strain as WLP001) in those styles. I've been impressed so far by the newer BRY-97 (West Coast Ale) dry yeast. I used it recently on a summer pale ale (started at 63, finished at 68) and it provided a very clean ferment that allowed the hops to shine through nicely.

 

[Xpertskir]

There should be very little difference between dry and liquid as far as re-pitching goes.

People are always going on and on about accumulated mutations with re-pitching. While there may be some of that, accumulated contamination is a much more likely source of batch-to-batch degradation. 5 successive batches is not that many generations.

This.


FWIW OP, I never use wy1056 or WLP001 anymore. Dry yeast is easier and it's pretty close to the same result(I find 05 to be slightly less flocculant).

The yeast quality is the same, and the viability and stability of dry yeast is far better than liquid.

There are not other differences and the reason for a smaller "menu" of dry yeasts is a business decision, not a problem with drying specific strains.

 

[EarlyAmateurZymurgist]

The yeast mutations usually start after about the 3-5 generation. I have kinda bipassed this by making a starter that is 1L extra and saving that liter of starter in a sanitized ball jar and pitching the rest into the beer.

Your practice does not keep the culture at gen #1.

If you want to go crazy with it; after the liter has settled in the fridge, decant the liquid, boil and cool some water and throw it in the jar. Shake it up and bam. Super clean yeast for next time. This is kind of how white labs does it from what I've heard.

If White Labs uses water in their process, it is more than likely autoclaved distilled water. Boiled tap water is not sterile. Most public water supplies are buffered into the alkaline range to prevent pipe corrosion. Any buffering agent that is added to a water supply will affect the pH of the culture. Distilled water contains no minerals or colloidal matter; therefore, its pH is easy to push in either direction.

With that, I am willing to bet that White Labs doesn't propagate yeast in a pure malt extract solution. It is more than likely a proprietary laboratory-style culturing medium that is a combination of malt extract, peptone, dextrose, yeast extract, trace elements, and vitamins. The dry yeast manufacturers propagate yeast in a medium that uses molasses as the carbon source.

 

[EarlyAmateurZymurgist]

For example I think that safale 05 is the strain that Sierra Nevada uses for a lot of their beers, by the second or third pitch, why isn't it then as good as the original liquid, is something lost in the process??

There was a time, not all that long ago, when the quality of dried brewing cultures was absolutely dreadful. Poor dried yeast quality was the driving force behind yeast management becoming my sub-hobby within the hobby. Back then, the difference between using cultured yeast (or a liquid culture) and dried yeast was like the difference between night and day.

With that said, I still pitch cultured yeast because I use cultures that are not commercially available. However, I do keep a package of US-05 on hand as a backup plan. I haven't pitched a White Labs vial or a Wyeast smack pack in over sixteen years. I pretty much only purchase yeast on solid media (slants or plates) or in lyophilized form from major culture collections these days.

 

[swem]

There was a time, not all that long ago, when the quality of dried brewing cultures was absolutely dreadful. Poor dried yeast quality was the driving force behind yeast management becoming my sub-hobby within the hobby. Back then, the difference between using cultured yeast (or a liquid culture) and dried yeast was like the difference between night and day. With that said, I still pitch cultured yeast because I use cultures that are not commercially available. However, I do keep a package of US-05 on hand as a backup plan. I haven't pitched a White Labs vial or a Wyeast smack pack in over sixteen years. I pretty much only purchase yeast on solid media (slants or plates) or in lyophilized form from major culture collections these days.

Thanks for all the info guys. Haven't pitched a white labs or wyeast in 16 years! Wow. How do you keep up such a yeast bank??

 

[MedicMang]

Your practice does not keep the culture at gen #1.

I never said that I am doing perfect lab work at home. It is just a hell of a lot "cleaner" than just washing the yeast. It's nice not having to constantly buy the same strain and it is the closest way that I could think to keep it as close to Gen 1 as possible without needing to slant or buy a bunch of other stuff.

 

[benj]

There should be very little difference between dry and liquid as far as re-pitching goes.

People are always going on and on about accumulated mutations with re-pitching. While there may be some of that, accumulated contamination is a much more likely source of batch-to-batch degradation. 5 successive batches is not that many generations.

I would agree that accumulated mutations shouldn't be a huge factor over 5 batches.... I'd have to look into it though. I'm pretty sure some researcher somewhere would have addressed this. However, 5 batches of beer is a lot of generations for the yeast. They're microbes and have very short generation times. One batch = a lot of generations. For what it's worth wikipedia says the generation time for S. cerevisiae is about 100 min.

 

[corax]

I would agree that accumulated mutations shouldn't be a huge factor over 5 batches.... I'd have to look into it though. I'm pretty sure some researcher somewhere would have addressed this. However, 5 batches of beer is a lot of generations for the yeast. They're microbes and have very short generation times. One batch = a lot of generations. For what it's worth wikipedia says the generation time for S. cerevisiae is about 100 min.

The limiting factor on generations in a fermentor is cell density, not time.

If you're pitching a decent amount of yeast, you'll get at most 6 or 7 doublings (ie, generations) per batch. Let's be generous and call it 8. So 5 batches represents about 40 generations.

Mutations are random events that happen in single cells. Adaptive mutations can become predominant in a large population, and in principle, 40 generations would be enough to do that (2 to the 40th is a pretty big number). But ONLY IF the adaptive mutation happened in the first few generations and ONLY IF it was so adaptive that the cells that had it could fully out-compete all the other cells in the population. In other words, don't hold your breath -- in practice it takes hundreds of generations for an adaptive mutation to "sweep" a population.

Compare that with the many opportunities even the most sanitary of homebrewers give to wild yeasts and bacteria to dive into the pool over the course of 5 brewing sessions, and my money is squarely on contamination being the bigger problem.

 

[EarlyAmateurZymurgist]

I never said that I am doing perfect lab work at home. It is just a hell of a lot "cleaner" than just washing the yeast. It's nice not having to constantly buy the same strain and it is the closest way that I could think to keep it as close to Gen 1 as possible without needing to slant or buy a bunch of other stuff.

Slanting doesn't keep the culture at gen #1 either. Every slant-to-slant transfer that is made is counted as a culturing generation (every one of my slants carries a culture generation number). A commonly accepted practice with slants is to subculture working slants from a reference culture. The working slants are used to make starters and other working slants out to a prescribed number of culture generations before returning to the reference culture. A new reference culture has to be made periodically or the culture will be lost, which makes genetic drift inevitable. The only way to prevent genetic drift is to store a culture at −196C/−321F using liquid nitrogen, which is highly impractical for amateur brewers.

With that said, yeast rinsing is completely unnecessary. Yeast doesn't need to washed. As I have asserted and given the science behind my assertion many times, the practice of rinsing yeast with boiled water is little more than amateur brewer voodoo. An amateur brewer doesn't have to jump through hoops to keep his/her yeast cultures completely trub free. Yeast can be cropped and repitched without doing a darn thing to it.

 

[EarlyAmateurZymurgist]

compare that with the many opportunities even the most sanitary of homebrewers give to wild yeasts and bacteria to dive into the pool over the course of 5 brewing sessions, and my money is squarely on contamination being the bigger problem.

+1

 

[Nameless_Matt]

With that said, yeast rinsing is completely unnecessary. Yeast doesn't need to washed. As I have asserted and given the science behind my assertion many times, the practice of rinsing yeast with boiled water is little more than amateur brewer voodoo. An amateur brewer doesn't have to jump through hoops to keep his/her yeast cultures completely trub free. Yeast can be cropped and repitched without doing a darn thing to it.

The last of the beer that didn't go up the siphon was plenty to swirl up the yeast at the bottom and now my yeast is sitting happily underneath it. I probably lost 2x bottles of beer worth at the most but saved myself so much hassle and risk of contamination.