Weedy's Double Yeast Choices

After going to an awesome bottle share yesterday and talking to everyone there, I realized that a bunch of people were excited to get information about the new recipe I'm working on. Coincidentally, I'm anxious to start talking about it! Since I'm working on a yeast starter right now for a few test batches to be brewed this week, I figured I'll start my experiment updates with covering some yeast options.

When most people want to talk about DIPA recipes, everyone wants to discuss the hops. Obviously, hops are the big distinguishing ingredient of DIPA's. However, most people will get their exciting hops and then skimp on yeast selection. In my experience, anytime a homebrewer is asking for advice on a double ipa recipe, the common advice is always something like follows. 1. Keep the grain bill simple with little to none caramel malts. 2. Pick your favorite "C" hops (Cascade, Centennial, Citra, Chinook, Crystal, Columbus, etc.) and load up the hop additions at the end of the boil. 3. Pick a clean fermenting American Ale yeast (Wyeast 1056, White Labs 001, or Safale US-05). This is a proven recipe for success and it will make for a good starting point for a typical DIPA.

For the longest time, I followed that advice and I have made some really good beers that way. But now with so many people following the same formula for success, I've had to wonder what there is that is exciting about new Double IPA's. If everyone is doing that, what sets apart the great double IPA's from the average ones (other than brewing proficiency)? There are potentially 900-950 flavor compounds that can come from fermentation alone... Why wouldn't we want to take advantage of the potential flavors?

That train of thought lead to me thinking about some of the great double IPA's that have been brewed recently. In the last 2 years, we have seen a huge shift in the craft beer community as far as what is considered a great DIPA. One trend that I thought was funny was the sudden interest in cloudy DIPA's which seem to be typical of Northeastern breweries. The trend has caught on so much that now Stone has released an unfiltered variation of their Enjoy By series. It was so funny to me that we had released batches of cloudy Weedy's in the past by mistake and felt bad about it and now we have huge breweries purposefully releasing cloudy beers and customers that are complaining that the beers aren't cloudy enough.

So a week or two ago I had a little bit of a lightbulb moment. Stone's Unfiltered Enjoy By was a beer that I thought was pretty good, but not great. I didn't think that it had the same flavor components that some of the Northeast cloudy IPA's have and as a result, it really just kind of tasted like yeasty Enjoy By. In contrast, the Northeast IPA's I've had always seem to have significantly more hop flavor than the clearer, extremely hoppy West Coast IPA's. I started wondering how the cloudy IPA trend came to be. My theory: A few breweries brewed really good IPA's with special yeast strains (Notably, Conan yeast in Heady Topper and Hill Farmstead beers). Beer enthusiasts realized that the beer was world class beer despite the cloudy appearance and began to associate cloudy IPA's with these extremely tasty beers. So now cloudy IPA's are all the rage and breweries like Stone, Boston Beer, and others are trying to cash in on that by releasing their own beers that have sediment in the bottle.

The problem with that train of thought though, is that the breweries that are mimicking the appearance aren't getting the same flavors that the Northeast breweries are getting. Why? Because they are using yeast strains that are too neutral in flavor. What I believe has happened with some strains of yeast is that they have evolved in a way that they lose their ability to fall out of suspension when they are coated with hop oils and resins. Some yeast strains normally fall out of suspension very easily, but once you dry hop a beer that uses one of those specialized strains, they lose their ability to flocculate. So since those yeast cells are coated with hop oils and resins, there are flavors on those cells that would normally be lost in a clearer beer.

In addition to that, some of these strains have developed esters that can be confused for hop flavor. Some people describe these esters with words like "tropical," "peachy," "juicy," "fruity," "pear," and "melony." So when drinking an aggressively hopped double ipa fermented with one of these yeast strains, the distinction between hop flavors and fermentation flavors can be lost. With flavor profiles like that, it is hard to imagine why the common advice is still to use a neutral American Ale yeast strain. There are two yeast strains that I believe exhibit these characteristics that I will be experimenting with.

The first one is a strain that evolved from English yeast (believed to have originally been Boddington's house yeast). It is only available through a very small yeast lab and is not actually available for most brewers to use. However, if you know how to propagate yeast colonies, it can be a very rewarding strain. The second strain is from Wyeast and it is the strain that the first one is believed to be evolved from.

Since the beginning of my research on these yeast strains, I have known that I want to maximize the esters they produce. To do so, there are a few things that brewers normally try to control. 1. Temperature of Fermentation. 2. Amount of Yeast Pitched 3. Amount of Aeration of the Wort. The thing that most brewers don't have the ability to control which also has an impact on ester formation is the amount of pressure exerted on the beer in fermentation.

In most American breweries, the common type of fermentation vessel is a Cylindro-Conical vessel. These fermenters are great for the majority of beers a brewery would want to brew. However, there are flavor compounds that can be achieved with other types of fermenters. For example, if a fermenter is wide and shallow, the yeast wouldn't have as much pressure built up on it during fermentation and would increase ester production and decrease diacetyl production. Fortunately for us, we have a 1,000 gallon vessel that was originally intended to  be used for lagering. For a multitude of reasons, we never did set it up as a lagering tank. Now, it can be used as a fermenter and we can have all the benefits that would come from open fermentation without the big downside (potential contamination from open air).

So the beginning of our DIPA experiment starts with yeast... The ingredient most frequently thought of last in a double. So where does that get us started?

1. The beer should exhibit intense esters that will be tropical in flavor
2. The beer will be cloudy with yeast covered in essential hop oils and resins
3. The beer will have a soft mouthfeel and will still be dry like our DIPA always has been

I would call that a good start!