Mixing of traditional beers into Brett Saison's, Sour Brown's and other goodies are getting confusing. The lines outlining a proper style are blurring into a muddled mess. A honestly, this is great news my taste buds. With homebrewer's redefining the traditional guidelines Sac, Brett, Pedio and Lacto are used for, why haven't we played with Wine yeast? It seems like the best of both worlds. Wine yeast contributes a lot of fruity esters, which we has homebrewer's work hard to recreate with sour aging. The thought of taking the good with the good has always intrigued me. Would the same
benefits wine yeast gives to wine carry over into a traditionally fermented beer? Could I create a cherry like Stout or Porter with only the yeast? Before I could create a recipe and just "Toss" in some wine yeast, I wanted to do some research. Luckily, The
Brewing Network's Sunday Session had S
hea Comfort on a couple years back. Shea is called the "Yeast Whisper" from MoreBeer. If you haven't listened to it, I would. If you have, I would listen to it again.
Wine Yeasts are in the same family as Saccharomyces cerevisiae because of that, they behave very similar. You do have a couple major differences/notes that you must be aware of:
- Yeast are all classified as killer, neutral, or susceptible. Killer
will kill off susceptible, but not neutral. Neutral and susceptible will
get along fine.
- All ale yeast are "Susceptible" Most wine yeasts are killer. That
means that any wine yeast added to a fermenting ale will kill off the ale
yeast already present. (On a side note, wine yeast will not kill off Brettanomyces yeast, more on that later)
- Wine yeast, like ale yeast, are strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae family. However, wine yeast
strains are incapable of fermenting maltotriose. Maltotriose is a grain
sugar, and thus is not present on honey or grapes, so it isn't an issue for
mead or wine fermentation. But it creates a problem using them for Beer (grain) fermentation.
