…starters grown in sterile environments exceed yeast populations in dry packets, I usually have beers at full krausen in less than 6 hours!
Depends on the size of the starter. According to Fix, you don’t want to overpitch either. I’ve gotten fermentation from dry yeast in under 6 hours. Anyway, fermentation time doesn’t necessarily = viability. If you were sanitary, getting full krausen in 24 hours will have no problems 99% of the time.
Following your theory - if said starter has more yeast: [quote=“RevLeonidas”]t’s more likely that a group of 100,000 living beings has fewer sick and deformed or dysfunctional than a group of 500,000,000,000 living beings; it’s just basic logic.[/quote]
I recently submitted an article to BYO on simple recipe brewing. Part of my research included going over the last five years of results of the National Homebrew competition. In the last five years only two gold medal winning beers used dry yeast. The two highest scores that I ever received were for beers brewed with dry yeast.[/quote]
That’s interesting.It still doesn’t prove to me that liquid yeast is inherently superior to dry yeast,though.It just says to me that,most likely, a lot of homebrewers have bought into the idea that it is,out of fear of losing competitions.I don’t think you’re trying to argue with me,so don’t get me wrong.
[quote=“RevLeonidas”]Simple fact, the more numbers you have, the greater the chance for a flaw: elementary statistics.
Red more of Dr. Fix’s stuff on homebrew, as I can see that Jr. high mathematics is too complex for this forum: sorry![/quote]
So do you pitch one yeast cell? If not I think you should.
I don’t think most home brewers can achieve a sterile environment. If there is yeast present then by definition it’s not a sterile environment because yeast are a microorganism.
It’s so easy to fool yourself once you get an idea in your head. The only way to really know is to do a blind triangle test.[/quote]
This is an odd phenomenon, but I think it’s probably just a coincidence that those beers were made with dry yeast. I think the real answer most likely lies in the way they were carbonated, not in the way they were fermented. Personally, I’ve gone to krausening all of my beers, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. The carbonation and mouthfeel of my beers are far better than in beers I made in the past by using priming sugar or carbonation tabs, or even with forced carbonation. And there’s no added expense for additional sugar, either. You just pull off a measured amount of wort ( or gyle, properly speaking), set it aside in sealed bottles until the beer is ready to bottle, and then pour it into the beer on bottling day. Couldn’t be easier.
One tidbit from Chris White’s book on yeast that struck me is that he points out that a shorter lag time is not necessarily a better lag time. That’s the time period during which the yeast are building up their nutrient reserves and getting ready for primary fermentation. If you’re cutting it too short you can end up with less healthy cells that won’t do as good a job of it. (Supposedly you can also end up with increased fusel alcohol production, though I’ve never experienced issues with fusel alcohols myself and heard it’s usually not an issue at homebrew scales.)
Anyway, he suggested that fermentation shouldn’t start until 4-15 hours into the job. According to that advice, seeing much in the way of krausen at 6 hours isn’t necessarily such a good thing.
Possibly related anecdote: I’m currently futzing with a ferment that hit high krausen in short order like that, and then proceeded to stall out at 1.020 the next day.
I’m kind of inclined to speculate that krausening is both the way it’s carbonated and the way it’s fermented.
With how yeast normally tend to start with the simplest sugars and work their way up to the bigger molecules if you leave them to their own devices, krausening’s kind of an interesting situation because it lets the yeast go through that whole cycle once, and then gives them another shot of wort so that they go through it all over again but with all the sugars at a lower concentration. Makes me wonder if that has the side benefit of sort of keeping them “interested” longer so that they’ll do a better job of cleaning up some of the harsher fermentation by-products.
Be interesting to do a side-by-side experiment: Take off only like a 10% gyle. After the initial fermentation’s over, split the beer so you can krausen half of it and use some other method to carb the other.
One tidbit from Chris White’s book on yeast that struck me is that he points out that a shorter lag time is not necessarily a better lag time. That’s the time period during which the yeast are building up their nutrient reserves and getting ready for primary fermentation. If you’re cutting it too short you can end up with less healthy cells that won’t do as good a job of it. (Supposedly you can also end up with increased fusel alcohol production, though I’ve never experienced issues with fusel alcohols myself and heard it’s usually not an issue at homebrew scales.)
Anyway, he suggested that fermentation shouldn’t start until 4-15 hours into the job. According to that advice, seeing much in the way of krausen at 6 hours isn’t necessarily such a good thing.
Possibly related anecdote: I’m currently futzing with a ferment that hit high krausen in short order like that, and then proceeded to stall out at 1.020 the next day.[/quote]
+1000! I think it’s hilarious when people boast about how fast their fermentations take off. Some post active fermentation within hours like its some sort of accomplishment. As you stated, lag time is needed and healthy. A quick starting fermentation means you either pitched too much yeast or you pitched your yeast into an environment that wasn’t conducive to proper growth. Meaning the yeast can multiple and grow properly. Which in return can lead to unwanted fermentation results.
Notingham for dry yeast, drops like a rock to.
As for the quick fermentations, I suspect most people are just lying when they are kicking off at 2hr or something. WIth pitching a normal starter and plenty of oxygen I have never seen krausen in a couple hours in over a decade of brewing. May see something barely forming at 5 or 6hr…
NONE of us have a sterile environment to grow starters.
It’s also likely to be because there were no appropriate dry strains for the beers. I really don’t think it tells us much.
I tried that. In an experiment, I did krausening along with priming with various sugars and force carbing. 2 months later, in a blind tasting, no one could tell the difference and no one expressed a preference for one over another.
I have done that…no one could tell a difference in a blind tasting.
NONE of us have a sterile environment to grow starters.[/quote]
just because you’re making a starter that doesn’t mean it is going to have more cells than a dry pack, there are all kinds of variable that come into play on that.
I have done that…no one could tell a difference in a blind tasting.[/quote]
Sad, but I guess not entirely surprising. Sometimes I wonder if all claims about the benefits of krausening can ultimately be traced back to advertising campaigns for Heileman’s Old Style Beer®.
OK, so what? What does that have to do with your contention?
That article is almost 5 years old. And when talking about mutation, the author uses the key word “may”. If dry yeast was harboring a significant amount of mutated cells, more home brewers would be having a lot more issues. Even professional breweries use bricks of Nottingham.
It’s just your conclusion I take issue with. Dry yeast has come a long way. I still prefer liquid for a lot of reasons, but dry is a quality alternative - in my opinion.
I’d take the word ‘may’ with a grain of salt, too. There’s apparently no research backing it up; it’s just one guy’s speculation. Measured by that evidential standard, pretty much anything may be true.
Against that, I’d gladly offer my own speculation: It may not, since to my knowledge dextrose and maltose are not mutagenic. More likely, they just create a selective pressure that favors individuals that do better in that kind of environment. If genes for certain flavor compounds or other fermentation characteristics co-occur with the genes that help yeast do better in that kind of environment, then that would presumably have an impact on the yeast character you’d get from dry and non-dry versions of the same strain.
-but- even assuming there is a difference, “different” does not necessarily imply “inferior”.
-and- if that’s the case, then you’re putting a similar kind of pressure on your yeast when you propagate it in any medium whatsoever.
-and- given the number of times I’ve read about people failing to be able to tell the difference between US-05 and 1056 in blind taste tests, I’m inclined to guess that none of this speculation survives a reality check, anyway.
