I already seen one local brewery utilize this yeast strain and now the next iteration of BP Sculpin is going to be using it as well. According to: https://www.whitelabs.com/yeast-bank/wlp644-saccharomyces-bruxellensis-trois It seems to be a yeast strain that is similar to Brett but ferments quicker? Have not herd about this yeast stain until recently, and it appears to be getting wider adaption. Your thoughts on this BAs?
Do you want the long version or the short one? The short version is that this yeast strain is not Brettanomyces. The long version is that it was a strain of yeast misidentified as Brettanomyces by White Labs, who should have done PCR on it and determined that before labeling it as Brett. It is a POF- strain of yeast, which means that it produces none of the phenols for which many Brett species/strains are famous, and is simply a strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae that produces a lot of tropical esters. It, therefor, has none of the fermentation dynamics of Brett, i.e. it grows and ferments like Sacch. because it IS Sacch.
I've used it a couple of times. I like it, but it's not something I think of as very special. I prefer to use a real Brett blend for complexity and to watch the flavor development. I really liked using it in a dry hopped sour that I brewed at Blue Pants in Alabama a year and a half ago. I think that they switched a while ago to using it for their IPA's in a blend of yeast. The nice thing about it is that you can get some of the Brett like flavors without the fear of cross contamination. The Sculpin variant was on tap at a beer fest in Phoenix earlier this month. I liked it.
Weedy, I know you are a fan of Imperial Yeast Co. Have you ever brewed using Imperial Yeast Dry Hop Yeast (A24)? As I understand it is a blend of Conan and Saach Trois (Brux Trois). Last fall I used this yeast blend to brew my version of Alchemist Focal Banger (I called that batch Jack’s Focal Point IPA) and I was quite pleased with how that beer tasted. I discussed this beer in a New Beer Sunday thread: https://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/new-beer-sunday-week-676.558109/#post-5861300
Yeah, I had a friend brew some test batches for me where I had him just split twenty gallon batches into multiple carboys. We tried Conan, Dry Hop, and Citrus. My favorite was the Citrus in those experiments. I think Blue Pants is using Dry Hop now and I liked the beers I had when I visited at Thanksgiving. They had pulled a lot of pineapple flavor out of the blend.
Were there any notable differences in fermentation performance of those three beers? For example, did they attenuate to a similar level? How about length of primary fermentation, any difference there? Did the Conan beer have 'floaties'? Etc? Cheers!
Each of them was at terminal gravity in four days. The Conan beer needed two days longer conditioning than the others to pass a diacetyl test. The Conan was also two gravity points higher than the other two. Visually, they all looked exactly the same to me. They were all dry hopped during fermentation. No floaties.
No problem, man. It's a neat yeast strain to work with, it's just not Brettanomyces. Which is OK. Not everything needs to be Brett to be cool.
