A Dry Yeast Rehydration Experiment

I picked it up from the GotMead forum, although I may have found it elsewhere, too. Given his influence on meadmakers, it may have come from the Ken Schramm mead book, or from some conference talk or podcast somewhere. I am pretty sure I have come across Schramm advocating this. Regardless, I just accepted on faith that an experienced meadmaker (either the dude on the GotMead Forum, or Schramm) had a good sense for what is good practice.

FWIW, after several failed attempts at writing a broad opinion piece about beer myths, dogma, and experimentation, I decided to omit most of it, because it sounded too preachy to me. I'll summarize by saying that we all brew a little differently and perceive our beers a little differently. The best we can do is adapt our brewing techniques to the feedback of those tasting our beers, filtered according to whose opinions matters most to each of us. For my brewing, my opinion is probably the most important. If am I am doing an experiment, it is so I can decide what works best for me. If someone aspires to win a Ninkasi award, be a professional brewer, or save their marriage*, they need to appease a different client.

*In the argument preceding my divorce, my ex-wife said to me "And your beer actually sucks!" It was a low blow. Needless to say, there was no possible reconciliation.

 

At some point, regardless of what scientific discipline you are engaged in, you have to accept something that experts say. You need to have a foundation to build upon, or else each scientist has to start from scratch. Figuring out where to draw the line, what to accept as foundational and what to question, and under what circumstances, is a huge part of academic research. (This is part of the preachy stuff that I was trying to avoid). The best you can do is decide what sources you trust and use that trust as a basis for your own investigations. The results may boost or undermine your support for those sources.

I think the yeast manufacturers are complicit in the rehydration dilemma. They are reluctant to tell you that the best dry yeast practice may not always be the easiest dry yeast practice, probably out of fear of making their product seem anything but user friendly. As a consequence, we find easy to use instructions on the packages and different, optimal use instructions (the equivalent of read the fine print) buried on their web pages, in white papers, etc. I think they are guilty of dumbing down the product info to make the easy sale, the same way the liquid yeast manufacturers have referred to their products as "pitchable" even when they knew best practice called for a starter. (Note: To be fair, it seems that the dry yeast folks try to make their product user friendly by giving you a boatload of viable cells, instead of trying to spell out the details of hydration and pitch rate.)

 

And a week or so has passed. Both the direct pitch and the rehydrated pitch finished at 1.003. The attenuation of both was 94%.Fermentis notes 82% on their pdf description of the strain. I neglected to say in the first post on experiment 2 that I conducted my mash at 148 F, which should contribute to a fermentable wort, and I did use a lb of candi syrup to make up part of the 1.056 OG, but I was caught off-guard by the low reading.

I thought I detected a slightly solventy aroma from the direct pitch batch that was not present in the rehydrated batch. I thought I noticed it with each of the first two sips I took. However, with continued side-by-side tasting, I lost confidence in my ability to detect it.

I am pretty displeased with the flavor. I don't think there is much if anything going on that makes you think of fermentation with a Belgian yeast strain. And there is that slight sourdough quality that turned me off of S-04. To this point and the point about the ephemeral solventy aroma, I have to confess that I have some lingering cold symptoms, so my sensory capacity is not peak.

What do I conclude? Nothing about this experiment would dissuade me from directly pitching dry yeast, except for the fact that I have never found an entirely adequate dry yeast for a Belgian Trappist style beer. The slight solvent note that I thought I detected could be worth exploring further, maybe in the context of the previous posts that questioned whether Belgian dry yeast packets represent an overpitch, if the goal is Belgian flavor. If I ever pick up this yeast again, trying to test that idea would be the reason. I'm going to think long and hard about whether I want to package these batches according to the original plan (kegging one batch and adding bottling Brett to the other) or just dump them. Perhaps they will just require packaging and patience.

It feels anticlimactic given all the tangential conversation.

 

Minor update on the results I posted earlier: I dumped both batches yesterday. I just couldn't see myself enjoying either beer, given that they still tasted like a dirt and sour dough. No longer hindered by a cold, I can say with certainty that the direct pitch batch did produce a solvent character that the rehydrated batch lacked. It made the direct pitch beer a little more unpleasant than the rehydrated batch, IMO. I think repeating the experiment would be important before attributing this flaw to improper rehydration. Not sure I want to repeat any time soon, given the results.

 

Temp was 64 F at pitching and 68 F was the highest I observed, but there was no direct control - ambient kitchen counter temp.

The dirt flavor could have been the hops and not the yeast. They smelled ok, and the wort tasted ok, but maybe something about adding the dryhops early in the primary, while the fermentation was quite active...?That’s not an explanation but just a possible point of departure for when things went bad. The explanation could be that the hops were old, from the 47 hops sale. I’ve brewed wit all of them in previous batches and they were not awful, or I wouldn’t have used them. Or maybe the hops and the yeast together added up to something I perceived as dirt

The yeast probably did produce the slight sour dough thing that I dislike. The yeast probably did produced the slight solvent character. There are people who won’t dump their beer, and I’m not one of them. Once I decide a beer is going to be a chore to drink, I stop investing time in it. Maybe many people would have tasted it and kept it.

 

Thank for posting this.
If lagering, this would be 36 hours to get from 70F to 50F, if my math is right. Does taking this long to get there seem reasonable? Are temperature controls with a ramp function pretty common these days?

 

Yep, my mistake on the math.