Safale s-04

[AdeDunn]

Care to share your hobgoblin gold recipe? It's a lovely drop!


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Happily bud: Ade's Brew Days, I share all of the recipes I come up with or use. :thumb: Sneaky tastes from the trial jar, it's blummin lovely! Really fruity. Looking forward to getting it bottled, and eventually drinking it, naturally. lol

 

[cheeseyfeet]

Happily bud: Ade's Brew Days, I share all of the recipes I come up with or use. :thumb: Sneaky tastes from the trial jar, it's blummin lovely! Really fruity. Looking forward to getting it bottled, and eventually drinking it, naturally. lol

Cheers! I'll have to get a few hops in for that one, let us know how it is once it's bottled and you've cracked one open [emoji3]


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[trueblue]

Maybe I should clarify my opinion. My comment about lazy brewing was aimed at the professional brewers who I believe seek the cheaper or easier options. If I go to a restaurant I don't expect the chef to cook my meal in a microwave so why should I accept a commercial brewery cutting corners. This country has some of the finest brewers in the world built not only on tradition but also moving with the times and the better ones will still maintain their own often unique strains. I'm sure the likes of Adnams would not go to the expense of running a lab if they thought buying in dried yeast would produce the same quality beer. With home brewing I will always accept some will be happy with dried yeast especially those just starting up or others with time restraints and good luck to them but I would encourage other brewers to try for themselves to use the most of what is out there be it culturing from bottles, commercial liquid yeast or the best of all getting live yeast from a working brewery. Visit as many brewery's as you can, I have probably visited 25+ since I started brewing 45 years ago both in the UK and Europe, and if you can talk to the head brewer, not always possible, see how much they value their yeast. If you do buy a liquid yeast get the freshest date you can. I buy from the malt miller and on his site he publishes the best by date which is 6 months from manufacture so you can guarantee the viability before you buy. Put the yeast book on your Xmas list. Written in a way anyone can understand, even if I had to read some bits a few times, you will come away realising why it is our most important ingredient. I know I may come across as yeast geek but it is something I am passionate about and my own research, including attending lectures and having conversations with people like Dr, Keith Thomas of Brewlabs probably the leading yeast authority in the UK, has convinced me the quality of the yeast equates to the quality of the finished beer.

 

[Saisonator]

Maybe I should clarify my opinion. My comment about lazy brewing was aimed at the professional brewers who I believe seek the cheaper or easier options. If I go to a restaurant I don't expect the chef to cook my meal in a microwave so why should I accept a commercial brewery cutting corners. This country has some of the finest brewers in the world built not only on tradition but also moving with the times and the better ones will still maintain their own often unique strains. I'm sure the likes of Adnams would not go to the expense of running a lab if they thought buying in dried yeast would produce the same quality beer. With home brewing I will always accept some will be happy with dried yeast especially those just starting up or others with time restraints and good luck to them but I would encourage other brewers to try for themselves to use the most of what is out there be it culturing from bottles, commercial liquid yeast or the best of all getting live yeast from a working brewery. Visit as many brewery's as you can, I have probably visited 25+ since I started brewing 45 years ago both in the UK and Europe, and if you can talk to the head brewer, not always possible, see how much they value their yeast. If you do buy a liquid yeast get the freshest date you can. I buy from the malt miller and on his site he publishes the best by date which is 6 months from manufacture so you can guarantee the viability before you buy. Put the yeast book on your Xmas list. Written in a way anyone can understand, even if I had to read some bits a few times, you will come away realising why it is our most important ingredient. I know I may come across as yeast geek but it is something I am passionate about and my own research, including attending lectures and having conversations with people like Dr, Keith Thomas of Brewlabs probably the leading yeast authority in the UK, has convinced me the quality of the yeast equates to the quality of the finished beer.

Do you know where the national yeast bank is? Do you think brewers send a fresh sample to it on a regular basis and also would a brewer like Fullers have to keep going back to an earlier strain of their yeast so that it does not chance so much to alter their beers character?
Then again would the customer notice as it would be a gradual process.
Yes it's a fascinating subject.

 

[trueblue]

The national collection is in Norwich http://www.ncyc.co.uk Most brewers I have spoke to use as a back up only as keeping the strain alive in the brewery means it acclimatises and adapts to it's "home". I have no doubt certain strains, like the Adnams one that is notoriously a bugger to keep, may need to revert back to the original.

 

[Sadfield]

To clarify my position. Even Michelin starred chefs use microwaves. Cooking technology, techniques and ingredients advance all the time. Alternately, cooking on an open flame from a wood fire like our distant neanderthal relatives also yields exceptional results. Brewing is no different, choose the most suitable ingredient, equipment and techniques to achieve the quality end product you desire. It's not lazy, cheating or cutting corners, it is brewing smarter. There is merit in both the old and the new. A brewery existing for 100 years using the same strain takes equal attention to detail as a brewery being consistently voted in the top 10 in the world using whilst using dry yeast, as they see fit. There is always something to learn and improve. There will always be poor breweries, although the ingredients aren't to blame.

To quote Ferris Bueller,

"Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."

Edit: I'll add to this. Quality and character are not the same thing. Maintaining a strain, maintains character. Good process control maintains quality.

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[trueblue]

A good example of what a yeast means to a brewery is Green King. In the 1970's they were still a mid sized regional brewery producing some of the best beers around. Cask Abbott and bottled strong Suffolk were beers to behold. Early in the 1980's I worked in a bar that sold Abbott and suddenly some of the regulars were complaining, including me, the GK rep told us they had lost the yeast and despite retrieving it from the yeast bank the strain had been going for so many years no one at the brewery can remember when it was last revived. 30 years later and it still not the same beer but that could also be because the company is now ****.

 

[Saisonator]

Young's was bought out bought out and is Brewed by Charles Wells in Bedford. It was never up to the standard of Fullers but it's definitely taken a turn for the worse. I wonder if they discarded the original yeast and use dry now.

 

[Sadfield]

Young's was bought out bought out and is Brewed by Charles Wells in Bedford. It was never up to the standard of Fullers but it's definitely taken a turn for the worse. I wonder if they discarded the original yeast and use dry now.

A good example of what a yeast means to a brewery is Green King. In the 1970's they were still a mid sized regional brewery producing some of the best beers around. Cask Abbott and bottled strong Suffolk were beers to behold. Early in the 1980's I worked in a bar that sold Abbott and suddenly some of the regulars were complaining, including me, the GK rep told us they had lost the yeast and despite retrieving it from the yeast bank the strain had been going for so many years no one at the brewery can remember when it was last revived. 30 years later and it still not the same beer but that could also be because the company is now ****.

Surely, cost cutting has the biggest impact on quality. One thing I don't think you can say about dry yeast, at commercial level, is cheap. Cutting down on time and energy on the other hand, probably does save money.

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[Saisonator]

Surely, cost cutting has the biggest impact on quality. One thing I don't think you can say about dry yeast, at commercial level, is cheap. Cutting down on time and energy on the other hand, probably does save money.

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They were a family brewer and even delivered by horse and cart to the area local to the brewery in Wandsworth up until the 90's. So they must have had much pride in their history and what they produced.
Now it's just about the money.

 

[-Bezza-]

A good example of what a yeast means to a brewery is Green King. In the 1970's they were still a mid sized regional brewery producing some of the best beers around. Cask Abbott and bottled strong Suffolk were beers to behold. Early in the 1980's I worked in a bar that sold Abbott and suddenly some of the regulars were complaining, including me, the GK rep told us they had lost the yeast and despite retrieving it from the yeast bank the strain had been going for so many years no one at the brewery can remember when it was last revived. 30 years later and it still not the same beer but that could also be because the company is now ****.

Kind of makes the point as to why breweries might prefer to use dried yeast, I guess. Reduced risk of losing the yeast and less opportunity for the yeast to evolve meaning more consistent output over time. And as you say, it's been another 30 years and still that unique character has not been obtained again, so the micro breweries aren't going to have that, whether working from liquid, dried or whatever other form of yeast there may be.

 

[Dmet]

Surely if the end product is what the person making it wants it to be, it doesn't matter how they achieve it? It could be easy to be sniffy about it and say that they are being lazy not using liquid yeast and implying they are plastic brewers and not real ones. But actually start up breweries do struggle to achieve consistent results and if one way of doing it is to use known dried yeast, why not?

It is a bit like some CAMRA members only drinking bottle beers if they are bottle conditioned as they are the only proper beers, or cask over keg.

Conversely, there are some breweries that make beers that I don't like the yeast tang in the beers. Ringwoods is one for some of their beers and Wadsworths is the other. And I could pick up that same tang in the Shipyard brewery beer and DL Geary in Portland, Maine when I visited the breweries, both of which use Ringwoods yeast as Alan Pugsley helped to set them up.

A good interview with him here where he talks about Ringwoods yeast.

http://allaboutbeer.com/article/with-alan-pugsley/

 

[Gunge]

I think it's cobblers, as most things are to this increasingly world-weary old man. Like comparing beet sugar to cane... apart from the slight yellow tinge of the former when in solution, you can't tell them apart unless you're in the habit of carrying a mass spectrometer upon your person and are overcome by an irrational urge to get to the bottom of it. Just sup the goddamn beer and move on to the next one - it'll be a memory in minutes. As for the S-04 I've just sunk one and I like it, I like it a lot. Carbing up nicely too, as I was assured it would do!

 

[AdeDunn]

I think it's cobblers, as most things are to this increasingly world-weary old man. Like comparing beet sugar to cane... apart from the slight yellow tinge of the former when in solution, you can't tell them apart unless you're in the habit of carrying a mass spectrometer upon your person and are overcome by an irrational urge to get to the bottom of it. Just sup the goddamn beer and move on to the next one - it'll be a memory in minutes. As for the S-04 I've just sunk one and I like it, I like it a lot. Carbing up nicely too, as I was assured it would do!

End of the day Gunge, it's like I've said before. It's your beer, and it's up to you how you make it. Most of us aren't making beer for lots of other people, we're making it for ourselves, and maybe friends and family. Find a yeast you like, doesn't matter if it's liquid or dried if you like it. Like how I get criticised because I like jacket spuds cooked in the microwave, but hate them done in an oven in the traditional fashion. Traditional doesn't mean better, it just means using a method that's been used for a very long time...

 

[-Bezza-]

Make beer you like. Drink beer you like.

I don't hold my pen correctly. Nobody has ever given me any good reason to hold my pen a different way other than through what social convention dictates, or even eloquently explain why the way they hold their pen is correct. Some people have tried to suggest my handwriting would be neater if I held my pen correctly - that argument is generally short-lived if I show them what my handwriting looks like holding a pen properly. I have mastered holding the pen the way I do and am yet to meet someone who can write as neatly as me holding the pen that way.