Scottish Ale Yeast

[tmac2050]

Short Version:

Any thoughts on using Scottish Ale Yeast for a strong IPA?

Long Version:

I had planned on brewing a Wee Heavy with the recipe below. I moved and it never happened. I used some of the ingredients for an English mild. I thought I would scavenge some of the rest of the ingredients to throw together a strong IPA because the pipeline is drying up and I don’t want to commit to 5 gal of Wee Heavy at the moment, and I like to have an IPA on any old time.

Soooo,
Buy new yeast or rock on and ferment an IPA bill with Scotch Yeast.

Old Recipe:
4 lb English Mild
2.5 lb Briess Caramel 40L
0.125 lb Roasted Barley
12 lb Simpson’s Golden Promise
0.125 lb Peated Malt
0.125 lb Biscuit Malt
1 oz Fuggles @ 90
1 oz EKG @ 30

New Recipe:
12 lb Simpson’s
4 lb English Mild
1.5 lb Caramel 40
.125 Biscuit
1 oz Amarillo @ 60
1 oz Amarillo @ 45
1 oz Amarillo @ 30
1 oz Amarillo @ 15

Cheers,
Ty.

[the_professor]

Go for it. Absolutely no reason not to.
In the quest for reproducing my benchmark commercial IPA, I’ve played around with the Scots yeast and while I don’t use it routinely for IPA, I found that it makes an excellent one. Attenuation was great, and the balance of flavors was really superb with the various hop characters shining through nicely.
30+ years of experimenting with IPA using various different yeasts has satisfactorily demonstrated to me pretty well that the choice of yeast was, in the end, not nearly as critical as other aspects of the recipe (at least as far as IPA is concerned…in less aggressive styles the differences are more apparent).

Anyway…it’s definitely worth trying out for yourself.
Besides, whatever yeast you use (or for that matter, the origins of any of the ingredients) is totally irrelevant if you get the flavor profile you’re after and more importantly, if you like the results.
And the only way to determine that is to brew!

[tmac2050]

Thanks a ton. Just what I was hoping to hear.