Kveik strain recommendation

I’m definitely not the one recommend one. I’ve used Voss, Hornindal, Aurora, Oslo, Hot Head I think. I hated every single one of them. To me all the kviek yeasts produce this really weird texture.

Have a friend who is one hell of a professional brewer. Won tons of GABF medals including midsize brewpub of the year. He recently just started making a Wit with Voss I think and his has the texture as well, thought it might be just me. He agrees with me that it’s there but didn’t seem to mind it. It’s this weird mid palate slickness. It’s not really like the diacetyl texture but almost. His beer has less of it than the ones I’ve made however.

Some of the ferments I’ve done were clean, a couple were burnt rubber, all had the texture. The beers I’ve made with kviek yeasts have been hands down the worst beers I’ve made in 3 years.

I do like the Lithuanian strain from TYB that’s not technically Kviek and it’s not really clean. I still can’t figure out how to best use it in regards to pitch rate and all the other weird things that these yeasts require. I think mixing it with a Saison strain of sorts could be really cool. On its own it doesn’t attenuate enough for the beers I want to make with it.

 

I have a unique beer in the queue right now. Using the White Labs Opshaug. Single hop Strata, and single malt Viking Pale 2 row.
Going to throw a pound of spruce tips in at flame out too.
Wife is making me do a hard seltzer for her before I brew another beer. I know, Ill see my way out of here now.

 

What size batch are you brewing?

I annually brew a Spruce Ale where I add freshly picked new growth spruce tips. I use 4 ounces and I add them at flame-out with a 20 minute stand. This amount provides plenty of spruce tip aroma/flavor to those beers.

If you are a member of AHA you can read all about that beer:

J. Horzempa, “Spruced Up Homebrew,”, Zymurgy, Vol.4, No. 3 (May/June 2018)

Cheers!

 

Im doing a 5.5 gal batch. The tips are frozen from the interwebs. Id love to do them in the fermenter but Im worried about infection

 

In which case, based upon the three batches of Spruce Ale that brewed using 4 ounces of Spruce tips, I would suggest that you are using too much at 1 lb.

This is your beer here so you get to decide how you want to proceed.

Cheers!

 

I like Oslo for clean beers and Hornindal for beers with “character”

 

I've used Voss, HotHead, and Hornindal a few times each (basically, whichever LHBS had in stock when I wanted to brew). I liked all of them for doing a West Coast-NE hybrid IPA (Base malt plus just a smidgen of caramel, mash for attenuation, well bittered, then finish and dry hop like NE-style). Didn't really notice too much of a mouthfeel thing with it, but then again, there wasn't much in the way of protein or dextrins for it to effect? Did my normal pitch around 60F and allow to free rise. Only done this in the summer, so temps got fairly high. All have attenuated well.

With the amount of hopping, not sure you could really pick out the subtleties of the esters each gave off, but each did add that little something extra that I wouldn't have gotten from Chico.

Have also done a couple of strong darker ales with Voss, a Spiced Old Ale and a Foreign Stout. The orange notes really rounded out the caramel and spices on the old ale, and accentuated the chocolate on the stout.

 

How high is 'fairly high'? mid to upper 80's, 90's? I'm interested in what it was that brought out the orange notes from the Voss.

 

1 package into wort ~1.070

 

Mid 80s. Wasn't strong, but was there.

This was the Omega Voss strain, not TYB Voss.

 

Omega is what I've considered using in a chocolate-orange stout, with enough Amarillo or Idaho7 to complement the claimed citrus of Omega Voss.
Thanks for the info.

 

IMO, Voss is great for a NEIPA. I get the haze with a simple grist (no oats/wheat, etc) and the feel is not too thin despite the attenuation (FG 1.012 for a DIPA). Prominent citrus notes that complimented Citra/Simcoe hops well. I'm not sold on it for other styles, but it's my house IPA crowd-pleaser yeast. Easy and fast.

 

I haven’t done that yet. I used a starter mainly to save more for future brews and pitched what I guessed would be about 0.7/M/ml/P. Fermented at 90. Finished in 24-36 hours and it had great orange notes. I’m planning on under pitching and comparing.

 

This guy is doing a show on Kveik. I believe it's free,just sign up with your email.
https://www.crowdcast.io/e/kveik-lars-garshol/register
the link gave me problems but seems ok now.

 

I used two different kveik isolates (neither is currently available, commercially, to my knowledge). Each isolate was first used to create a 2.5 gallon batch (one cream ale, one IPA) using 1 g of dry yeast and higher than usual fermentation temperatures (80F-ish). Following each of those batches, I used the yeast cakes to ferment a pale ale and a low gravity kvass wort that had been kettle soured.In both cases, the first batch produced interesting fruity notes that kveik is known for, but with rough edges. I tend to not finish my beers fast, and neither aged particularly well. The 2nd pitch beers lacked the fruitiness but also the rough edges, and were preferred.

Given the vastly differing beers I made, it's hard to draw a lot of far reaching conclusions from these anecdotes, but I think I may prefer beers that are produced via other traditional processes i.e., not the somewhat carefree, low pitch, high fermentation temp procedures that draw a lot of people to kveik strains.