Any serious objections to pitching three yeasts at the same time? English, Pale Ale, and a standard dry brew yeast…
Why?
Well to be honest we were not sure our wyeasts were activating properly, they had been in the fridge for 3 months, and after we started them we had no reaction for like 2 and a half hours, anyways we manually started them and they were both bubbling away by the time we pitched them, so we pitched them together, just as an experiment i guess, we heard a lot of craft breweries do it for flavour, so what the hell… O and we left out the dry yeast all together so theres that… :blah: anyways, guess well see, just wanted to know if anyone had any experience and or success.
Cheers.
It will be fine.
The reason people don’t do it, is because there’s no way of knowing which yeast will dominate. Inevitably one will out-compete the other by multiplying faster. Therefore your beer will be difficult to recreate. If that’s not your goal, then it’s not really an issue. As long as your other procedures were up-to-par, it will work out.
I can think of only two good reasons to pitch more than one package of yeast. One is to generate large numbers of yeast cells without a starter when making one isn’t an option due to time constraints. The other is to obtain the special flavor and/or aroma characteristics of a particular type of yeast strain, like a weizen yeast, and the potentially high attenuation of a strain like the Chico yeast at the same time, if that makes sense. Even that last concept doesn’t necessarily hold water if you can get high attenuation from the same yeast that you’re using for it’s flavor/aroma characteristics. Actually, though, come to think of it, in years past, when I lived in a house where the ambient temperature of the basement where I did my brewing was lower than desirable, I kicked around the idea of pitching both an ale yeast and a lager yeast, to make sure that I got complete attenuation by covering a broad range of temperatures for the yeasts. I never did actually get around to trying out that idea, though. To get back to your original question, though, if you’re going to pitch more than one package of yeast, in most cases, I wouldn’t want conflicting yeast characteristics making a mess of my beer, so I would stick to one strain. And I have to say that in the case of an IIPA, the hop flavors are going to dominate the beer anyway, so I would just choose a neutral yeast strain that attenuates well and just gets out of the way and lets the hops do the talking, and by all means make as large a starter as possible. If you must try the 3 yeast idea, save it for some other type of beer. Although, really, I can’t say what style of beer would benefit from that approach. If you do it, just do it with a lower-gravity batch where you don’t have a whole lot of time and money sunk into it, in case it bombs. That’s all I can say.
I can think of only two good reasons to pitch more than one package of yeast. One is to generate large numbers of yeast cells without a starter when making one isn’t an option due to time constraints. The other is to obtain the special flavor and/or aroma characteristics of a particular type of yeast strain, like a weizen yeast, and the potentially high attenuation of a strain like the Chico yeast at the same time, if that makes sense. Even that last concept doesn’t necessarily hold water if you can get high attenuation from the same yeast that you’re using for it’s flavor/aroma characteristics. Actually, though, come to think of it, in years past, when I lived in a house where the ambient temperature of the basement where I did my brewing was lower than desirable, I kicked around the idea of pitching both an ale yeast and a lager yeast, to make sure that I got complete attenuation by covering a broad range of temperatures for the yeasts. I never did actually get around to trying out that idea, though. To get back to your original question, though, if you’re going to pitch more than one package of yeast, in most cases, I wouldn’t want conflicting yeast characteristics making a mess of my beer, so I would stick to one strain. And I have to say that in the case of an IIPA, the hop flavors are going to dominate the beer anyway, so I would just choose a neutral yeast strain that attenuates well and just gets out of the way and lets the hops do the talking, and by all means make as large a starter as possible. If you must try the 3 yeast idea, save it for some other type of beer. Although, really, I can’t say what style of beer would benefit from that approach. If you do it, just do it with a lower-gravity batch where you don’t have a whole lot of time and money sunk into it, in case it bombs. That’s all I can say.
