Today I pulled two of my recent brews for a side-by-side taste test.
The beer on the right is my amber ale brewed with 2-row and Breiss 40L with Cascade hops using the Omega Hothead kveik yeast. This was the beer I stuck my arm in the bottling bucket. I also used a secondary (14 days) with this brew after 4 days in primary. Very nice balanced flavor after a month of bottle aging.
The beer on the left is my copper ale using 2-row and Breiss copper carapils with Cascade and Citra hops using the Loki kveik yeast. I only used the primary (21 days) with no secondary. The color wasn’t as copper as I wanted, more of a golden color. still a very nice color and flavor with earthy flavors from the Citra hops after a week of bottle aging.
Both are keepers, but of the two my favorite is the latter, the copper ale. The Citra hops and Loki yeast with its citrus flavor profiles give this a great taste and hoppy flavors without being over powering.
Nice to compare like that. Both look delicious. Hothead was the first kviek strain I used and I think it is my least favorite. I will try and contribute my own tale of two beers when the 2 i’m working on are done. They use almost the same malts, are almost the same percentage, have the same hops but staged completely different. The main difference is one uses a Saison strain and the other uses the Oslo strain from Bootleg Biology.
I’ll preface that I’m a rookie brewer with only 6 brews under my belt, but I couldn’t agree more about the Hothead yeast. It was my first use of the kveik yeast and I was extremely happy with how the kveik strain performed with my temps here in Arizona. But comparing it with the Loki kveik strain, I find that I like the Loki much better. The Hothead is just too clean. The Loki imparts some citus/grapefruit flavors you just don’t get with the Hothead especially when fermenting at temps in the 80’s and 90’s. So, if you’re in an area where the summer temps just don’t support the slow and low fermentation, the kveik strains are the way to go.
Try all the Kviek strains. They are subtlety different and many are mixed strains. I think Hothead is a single strain. I would recommend you play with Saison strains as well as they do nicely up to 78. There are also Wheat strains that perform nicely at 80
PM me an address and I’ll send you some voss and hornindal slurry. I have a bunch and don’t know when I’ll use it again. It’s less than 6 months old, clean and dense. Probably 3m cells/ml.
Sorry @dannyboy58. Wasn’t ignoring you, just haven’t looked at the computer in the past week. I’ll PM you, but if it’s a liquid yeast you might want to wait as it might not survive the shipment here in the heat.
