I’ve been planning a rye cream ale for a while, and as it turns out I will have a fresh cake of WLP007 from a pale ale (40ish IBUs, 6.5 or so SRM) that I’m considering using.
I know this is a somewhat atypical choice for a cream ale, but on the surface it seems like it could work well if fermented cool. This is my first time with WLP007 though, so if anyone with more experience has advice, I’d love to hear it!
Not the optimal yeast, but if you slightly over pitch and ferment cooler, like you said, I’ll be a fine beer.
I’ve heard of many US breweries using English yeast as their house stràin and adjusting pitching rates/ferm temps to get what they are looking for.
I make “british blondes” all the time using yeast like 1968, 1099 or 1028. These are relatively neutral yeasts so they’re well-paired with something like a blonde or cream ale. You may even get a little more of that british ‘bready, crackery, minerally’ thing which is delicious in a beer like that. I would just be careful of lower attenuation rates on some of these british yeasts because a cream ale should not finish sweet. Everyone’s system is different but if I were to make a cream ale/blonde ale with say, 1968… I would mash lower. 1028 is a better attenuater and offhand I don’t know the attenuation numbers on WLP007 so maybe look at that and mash in accordance with that. Otherwise, a british blonde is nice. Some people call them “English Summer Ales”, etc. Cheers.
Thanks for the comments, gents. WLP007 is supposed to be a monster attenuator, so I’m not as worried about finishing too sweet as I am getting flavor contributions from the yeast that wouldn’t work.
As Dan says, I have seen a lot about American PAs being brewed with English yeast–I’ve heard somewhere that Stone might use this very strain, but who knows.
I actually have 2 beers coming up that I could use this cake for…the rye cream and a porter based on Denny’s Nick Danger Porter. I may even use it for both since it’s probably going to be either that or Fermentis US05, which I’ve gotten a little tired of.
:cheers:
WLP007 doesn’t add much “British” character and if pitched and primaried below 65F you shouldn’t get any noticeable yeast contribution, particularly with the rye in there.
That’s what I’d have thought, but lacking first-hand experience I wanted to see if there were any dissenting opinions out there 
.
Thanks all–I’ll let you know if/how it goes!
I’m just in the planning stage for my first rye beer, so my $0.02 should probably be discounted to just $0.01. But in a cream ale, my hesitation would be the flavor interaction between the rye and corn. To my knowledge the rye lends a somewhat spicy dry note, while the corn has a kind of a front-of-the-palate sweetness. I could be way off, but I would be kind of worried about conflicting effects there.
