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This is an excellent book with an entire and substantial chapter on yeast. He examines the properties of kveik in depth and makes a comparison with non-kveik farmhouse yeasts including saison yeasts. It seems that most kveiks don't impart what he calls a "POF- phenolic off flavours", while other farmhouse yeasts do to a greater or lesser extent. Also kveiks can usually be dried. while the other yeasts can not.
I was going to post.... pretty much exactly this. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in beer, cultural history and ethnography. It also goes into great detail about kveik's (and to a lesser extent, by comparison, saison's) place in the yeast family tree.
But really quickly (and I'm generalising a lot here):
Common features:
- both Saccharomyces cerevisiae (although any given kveik can be 5-6 strains of sac cerv in one culture)
- can both tolerate warm fermentation without fusel alcohol production
- both considered 'farmhouse' yeasts FWIW but that's kind of an artificial category
Differences:
- saison is generally POF+, I think no 'true' strain of kveik is
- kveik
tends to be more interesting the hotter it gets up to about 35c or even 40c. Saison can tolerate these temps but it's not optimum range
- most kveiks can survive drying between batches and dry storage for some time
- many kveik strains are extremely flocculant - not sure that's the same with most saisons
- kveik is an extremely fast fermenter and doesn't need any real yeast mop-up time at the end
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about any of this :)
EDIT: Of course, of course, the speed of fermentation for kveik is a HUGE difference too (edited above). Many Norwegian farmers bottle or keg after 48 hours. Though we shouldn't take this as meaning that we can necessarily: according to Garshol, some farmers traditionally had/have a clever means of bottle/keg conditioning, which means it's not
quite done after the 48 hours. What happens is they package with a couple of gravity points to go and it's often stored cool in a cellar, pretty much flat with near zero yeast activity. Kveik is such a fast-acting beast that all you need to do if you're having a party is take the beer into a warm room and it performs secondardy fermentation in front of your eyes, and will keep doing so for hours, despite often having been poured into a big bowl, which you would expect would purge it of all carbonation. Fascinating stuff!