Brewery Yeast Choices

The most widely used American ale yeast would be the Chico strain - US-05, WLP-001, Wyeast 1056.

The Anchor Ale strain is also popular BRY-97, WPL-051 California V, Wyeast 1272.

These are both in the Siebel yeast bank and are BRY-96 and BRY-97. Chico is BRY-96, Anchor is BRY-97. Both of these were from the Ballantine brewery. The Balantine ales were made with BRY-97, the beers were made with BRY-96. There were two separate brew house, the old Schalk brothers' brewery made the beers. Ballantine has influence over what we are drinking today.

 

I think with IPAs and big stouts, the yeast is really not going to make much of a difference if it's a standard ale yeast. For the most part, it just gets covered up by the big flavors from the hops and malt in beers like that. I used different kinds of American ale yeasts in my homebrewing days and didn't see much of a difference, but it's not like I'm a pro or BJCP judge. People go on and on about the yeast for HT but I think that's way overblown TBH.

Rogue uses their house Pacman yeast for most of their beers, but many taste different because of all of the other factors of the brewing process. I wonder how different those beers would be if they used Wyeast American Ale. You'd certainly get different attenuation levels, which will obviously impact the gravity and therefore flavors, but I believe if you hop the heck out of a beer it will cover up a lot of those differences.

 

So both were brewed with a top-fermenting yeast, only different ones and in different breweries? Would make sense for US-05 to be so clean if it was originally bred to produce lager-like beers albeit at warmer temperatures.

 

In order.

1 - Why? We're quite happy with the strain we use and the flavors we get. We've taken the time to get to know it and are able to get a wide range of flavors suitable for many styles.

2 - Regarding logistics, adding an additional strain definitely means added complexity to the brewing schedule due to propagation. There's not an extra cost to us as we maintain our own yeast bank. We keep our yeast locked away at - 85 C and pull from slants when it's time to prop.

3 - Consistency - Definitely. Fermentations are very predictable and we know exactly which fermentation characters we're going to get.

 

The Schalk brewery was bought by Ballantine, and was next door IIRC.
Yes, BRY-96 Chico is clean due to the yeast genetics. I don't know if it was bred for that.

BRY-97 is a true top cropper, and is fruitier.

 

IMO consistency is the most important reason for having a house yeast strain. Most folks would equate consistency as meaning the resulting beer tastes the same like AB likes to advertise with Budweiser. AB will state that every Budweiser tastes the same whether it was brewed in Newark, NJ, Baldwinsville, NY or whereever.

But for a commercial brewery consistency is more than just the flavor of the resulting beer, consistency also means having a consistent production schedule which is needed for overall efficiency of brewing production. Knowing that given beer brand will complete primary fermentation in x days and that the packaging department needs to be ready of a date certain to package y barrels of Brand X beer. All of the necessary cans/bottles need to be put in place to package that particular brand of beer on that given date.

As consumers we may all like to drink 'different' beers (experiment with different yeast or hops or brands of malt) of a given beer style. I like this and that is why I homebrew: I get to choose which yeast strain to use and which of the latest 'new' hops to use and....

If I was the Manager of Brewing Operations at a commercial brewery I would lobby for using consistent ingredients (e.g., a house yeast strain) for brewing. If I was in a meeting with the brewery owners and the head brewer and I had to listen to the head brewer saying something like "how about using a Saison yeast strain to brew our flagship APA; maybe we could call that beer a Saisony Pale Ale" I would tell him to 'put a sock in it' and let me brew our flagship APA and make some money for the brewery.

Cheers!

 

One thing that would surprise many is that some breweries use dry yeast. It is easy to just use bricks of dry yeast. Cheaper too!

 

I think most brewers just find one yeast that they like and then use it for consistency and cost-effectiveness. We've had one house yeast for many years now and it's good to know a yeast that intimately from a production standpoint. Many brewers also like to cultivate a house flavor that one yeast provides across a range. That becomes part of the brewery's identity.

We use one ale strain, one lager strain, and then throw in hefeweizen and saison strains when we brew those styles, which is less regularly and the yeast does not get reused. Wild yeast and bacteria is a completely different game and those are maintained at our wild facility in large numbers. Fast-paced production breweries need a constant and ample supply of yeast, which means regularly harvesting yeast and repitching it. It greatly smooths production to focus on one or two strains, otherwise you are constantly harvesting and cleaning yeast tanks to keep things moving through the system.

 

As I posted above: "But for a commercial brewery consistency is more than just the flavor of the resulting beer, consistency also means having a consistent production schedule which is needed for overall efficiency of brewing production."

Cheers!

 

Same ale strain for your big beers?

 

For a small brewery, brewing say 15bbl batches, a new pitch of yeast might account for something like 30% of the cost of a batch. Re pitching that yeast into 3 or more other batches reduces this cost dramatically. So for many small breweries, experimenting with new yeast is a major cost increase unless they can use if for multiple beers.

 

I would have thought the same thing, but as far as the Belgian styles are concerned, I was told that Arcadia's Apollyon, which is a Belgian Strong Pale Ale, http://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/454/99952/ is brewed with the house yeast, Nottingham. The beer has a very Belgiany taste, so go figure. Somehow it's possible, although to a purist it probably is not a true Belgian ale.

 

I can see your point, but have never had the Arcadia beer to see how it compares. Many Belgian yeast have the POF gene, Phenolic Off Flavor. Hefeweizen yeast have the POF gene. I can't think of a British yeast that does.

Did Arcadia change their yeast? It was always Ringwood according to the Brewer I know who worked there, and it was a Pugsly/Austin system in BC. A few people say Tim Surprise likes the Ringwood yeast.

 

Aah, yeah, my bad, the wrong yeast name came out of my brain. It is Ringwood that they use for everything, and it is Tim Suprise's insistence for doing that.

 

The P. Ballantine & Sons ale and porter brewery (and malt house) was on the Passaic River at Front & Fulton in Newark when, in 1879, they bought the Schalk Brothers brewery on Freeman Street in the Ironbound section (also known as "Down Neck") of Newark, approximately 2 miles away. PB&S ran that lager brewery as their subsidiary, Ballantine & Co. The Schalk-built brewery was "next door" to the Christian Feigenspan Brewing Co, which would rise to become Ballantine's chief competitor in town by the first decades of the 20th century (in the early 1909, Feigenspan claimed to be the "largest ale producers in the US").

In 1915, Ballantine closed the ale brewery (the malt house remained opened) and moved all brewing, both top and bottom fermented beers, to the Freeman St. "lager" brewery. Public announcements by the brewery at the time claimed it was due to the city buying land and some of their buildings for street reconstruction but, possibly not uncoincidentally, a few years earlier the brewery had sued their neighbor, Public Service Electric & Gas, for polluting their wells.

After Repeal, and the purchase of P. Ballantine & Sons by a group of investors headed by the Badenhausen brothers, only the Freeman St. brewery re-opened - again brewing both ales and lagers. During 1943, they bought the Feigenspan brewery and combined the two facilities (see the 1912 map of the two and compare to an aerial view of P. Ballantine & Sons at it's peak in the 1950s). I've always assumed that they kept both brewhouses running but have never read anything that confirmed that or even referred to one as the ale brewhouse, the other the lager brewhouse, etc.

I have read that their lager beer was brewed with an "ale yeast" but, at the time in the US, the division between the two types of yeast was not considered as strict as it is today, and fermentation temperature and other processes were the difference between lagers and ales. See Wahl on Yeast (1937)

 

You sir are the historian on P. Ballantine &isoniazid.

 

Brewery yeast can be chosen for different reasons. Pros and cons for Ringwood.
Pros:
Fast fermenter, drops bright quickly, very British in profile, a true top cropper that can be harvested and used for years.
Cons:
Big Diacetyl producer, needs aeration, needs to be roused to drop Diacetyl, top cropping window is short (you might be at the brewery in the middle of the night), flavor can be too strong for some styles. It is known as a demanding mistress, er, yeast strain.

There are more breweries that use Ringwood than one would think. Some have a house strain that may have had origins from Ringwood.

 

Yep.

 

We keep more than 100 strains on-site to use if need be, but by-and-large, our ales (including Bigfoot and Narwhal) use our house ale yeast, our lagers use our house lager and Kellerweis uses Kellerweis yeast. We have several different Belgian yeasts and several Belgo/French Saison yeasts. Our pilot breweries use all sorts of strains for specialty work, but on the production side, it's usually one of a half-dozen or so different strains.

-Bill