whole new game !

[Johns Beer Shed]

thank you for the welcome .
me and my best mate are beer fans ... ie we like to drink it .. some which are relay good , and some which we think we could have made it better ourselves !
for the past year or so , we have been making batches up in the kitchen with beer kits , and over all its not bad ! but as we all know its lacking something .. what we dont know but its lacking !.
so in order to move up to the next stage we have invested in the kit etc and ready to move up to a whole new game .. where we will no doubt make mistakes , but have fun on the way as we learn a craft of making beer. and hopefully what we like to drink.. our fist mission is to aim to make a HPA as i could bath in the stuff its that good.. so to open this up we have a choice of yeast to which we would like some advice to do we go with . Nottingham or s-04 as the better option .. the golden promise barley is waiting in the wings .. and so am i .. but whats the thoughts as im guessing the yeast is the king pin to the end result .. i understand that hops etc will effect the outcome of flavor etc ... but choice of yeast ? or are we getting hung up over this as a first time brewers !.. and not too ?

 

[Linalmeemow]

Depends on the style you're going for, but S-04 or Nottingham will both make decent beer.

 

[Slid]

Is HPA a hoppy pale ale?
With American citrussy hops?
If so you perhaps want the so called "chico" strain. That is, in dry form, Fermentis Safale US05. It is well known for the style. There are perhaps better sources as wet yeast.

Rarely lets you down on other styles either.

 

[Johns Beer Shed]

slow down now .. HPA is a pale hoppy ale .. which we are aiming to create.. and what we have is in a packet .. guess dry form .. wet now your talking a different language ! as said we are new to this game so will need some holding of hands to start us off .. but appreciate the response .. will go with one or the other.. i guess that's why we have never got this far, as you read up on beer making and it can be like signing up to NASA. and i can only think that our debut launch will be a learning curb, but we have to have that first dipping our toes in the water so to speak..

 

[Johns Beer Shed]

but will the yeast impair the flavors or not ?? that's still in the back of my mind ..other wise why not just have one yeast on the market to buy ? again forgive me but just trying to understand the ins and outs of it all..

 

[Slid]

Chico gives very little flavour itself and allows both malt or hops to dominate.

 

[Zephyr259]

Different yeasts will impart different flavours, never used Nottingham but S-04 is a fairly typical English yeast so will give character in line with Engish bitters, so mildly fruity in general. Think Nottingham might be a bit cleaner (less flavour). S-o5 is very clean to the point that some folks use it for pseudo-lagers.

Good luck with the brew, really friendly forum here so feel free to continue asking questions as they come up. We've had a few new brewers appear over the last month so there's some good discussion threads already hanging about.

Welcome to the forum.

 

[Johns Beer Shed]

thank you all.. as said you can get caught up in a minefield of different approaches, what you should do or not, and the does and donts. i guess its like any new learning experience ,you learn as you go on, and no doubt this will be ether ok or a disaster.. i guess old man Guinness started somewhere ! bet his first batch was not what it is today ! any way thank you for the warm welcome and will be back again pestering the knowledgeable for some answers...

 

[Hoppyland]

Well, if you've been making beer for the past year from kits, and it isn't bad, then I guess you have a basic system that works fairly reliably.
So, don't panic! As you say, there's a whole world of information out there. Some of it makes things seem very complicated. Some of it is downright contradictory! (I think someone on this forum recently said "Ask 2 brewers a question and you'll get 3 different answers"!)
But you already know how to brew beer - its just that it isn't quite what you're after.
You say your beer is lacking something. My first question would be what sort of kit are you using? There's a world of difference between "kits". A dirt-cheap, single can kit where you need to add sugar is going to produce beer of a sort. A more expensive kit, no sugar needed, will give a significantly better result - but if you like hoppy beers (flavour and fragrance, not bitterness), then you'll find it lacking. More sophisticated kits might include liquid malt extract, additional grains that you can simply steep to extract colour and flavour, and "real" hops to give that added character. That might give you what you're after. There are also ways to "pimp" kits to make the result more to your taste, and if its hop flavour you're after then that isn't too difficult.
From what you say about your brewing journey so far then I think it is vastly unlikely that the choice of yeast is your main problem if the beer does not meet your expectations. Yes, yeast can and does make a big difference - there are "clean" yeasts, which contribute very little to the beer flavour, so the malt and hops are totally the dominant flavours. Then, there are "fruity" yeasts - often found in English ales with a malty character but relatively laid-back hopping (Ruddles best from ASDA is for me a classic of the style and absurdly cheap by modern standards!). Some European yeasts can indeed produce flavours that totally dominate the beer. But, basically, the malts used and the amount and timing of hopping will outweigh the yeast influence in most British-style, and especially hoppy beers.
If you give us a little more info (what type of kit, how you ferment and condition it etc) then you'll get better advice. Don't be put off by the apparent complexity of brewing - I can almost guarantee that of all the experienced brewers on this forum, no two will brew in precisely the same way (unless they use an automated system!). But they'll all make very good beer!

 

[Johns Beer Shed]

Thank you , Hoppyland for the response, we have brewed several kits , and added hops etc to give a little more punch so to speak but good advice from you on this ..but over all the results have not been that bad, apart from a kit i got from a chemist a few years back ! you could have cleaned the drains with it , in fact i did. and the drive !aunsure....

but the next move in our beer making champagne is from scratch , as we fancy the whole experience and experiment in from the start.
i'm lucky to have close by to work a micro brewery, and talking to the lad there basically gave me some , what i think was sound advice,
don't make it complicated , first of all cleanliness is half the battle so make sure all the equipment is spotless and sterile .
start with the water temps being right and make sure the stay where they should for both duration's , wort, and sparging, boil etc. ( so new thermometers where purchased)
make records of what you are doing , and make sure temperate is recorded. once the final boil is done, make sure the temperature of the beer is now down to 18/22deg before we pop the yeast in.
he said apart from the hops obviously, don't mess or tinker with anything else. just first off all make your first beer, and Judge the outcome, then the next time you can add or takeaway etc..

so here goes, and the other reason we like making it , we can drink it !
plus it keeps me out of the wife's way as well, double bonus
every ones a winner

once we've done it i will stick some photos up.

cheers all and thanks for the advice and help.

 

[rank_frank]

I find Nottingham and S04 to be similar but S04 will attenuate less than Nottingham so will leave a sweeter beer with more mouthfeel than Nottingham. I also suspect that Nottingham can ferment some of the longer chain sugars that come from higher temperature mashing whilst S04 cannot.

To give you some idea of the difference, I made an IPA mashed at 64C and with 18% cane sugar to give a dry beer. Fermented with Nottingham I got over 90% attenuation whilst my latest batch fermented with S04 has stuck at 75%. For this style that's not appropriate but may be for your beer.

I'm assuming that you mean Wye Valley HPA? Looking at their website it gives a rating of 2/5 for bitterness and 4.5/5 for sweetness so I'd probably try S04 to start with.

 

[AdeDunn]

John, it sounds to me like it'd benefit you to go buy a couple of good brewing books and have a good read, at your own pace. Forum advice tends to come at the pace of the poster, which may not always match your own.

Two excellent books for those just starting out, in my humble opinion, are Brewing Britain: The Quest For The Perfect Pint by Andy Hamilton (my actual favourite), and Home Brew Beer by Greg Hughes (good for the basics, but I find his recipes a bit bland).

As to yeasts, you can find yourself running around all over the place if you're not careful. Me, I mostly keep it simple. If I want to brew a nice British style I use Mangrove Jack's M36 Liberty Bell Ale. Hoppy pale ale/IPA M44 West Coast. Saison M29 French Saison. Belgian Wit (think Hoegaarden) M21 Belgian Wit. I've dabbled with others, but these are reliable performers, especially M36 Liberty Bell. This is just my own preference though, and once you get your hand in, there's a whole world of liquid yeasts to explore that give far more variety (about to brew with one myself today, all been well).

 

[Oneiroi]

Maybe not worth it on your first brew but if you have a spare fermenter from previous kits split the batch in half and use one of each

 

[Simonh82]

Just checking, are you trying to recreate Wye Valley Brewery HPA or a generic hoppy pale ale. This may be adding in too much for your first all grain brew but HPA is bottle conditioned, so you could get the real yeast quite easily. I've harvested yeast from bottles quite a few times @MyQul has a good how-to somewhere either in the yeast and water forum, or how-tos.

You will need to boil up a little bit of malt extract and leave 1cm of beer in the bottom of your HPA bottle. Swirl this up and add it to the extract. Shake the container as often as possible to help the yeast grow and stay in suspension. After a couple of days you can step it up to a larger volume of malt extract solution, then again a couple of days late. Three steps have always been fine to get me to a pitchable amount. I've usually started with 2-3 bottle dregs though.

As I say, this might be too much for your first AG brew but if you want to clone the recipe then yeast is an important factor. If you are just sticking with Nottingham or S04, I'd go S04 every time but that's just a personal preference.

 

[MyQul]

This is it

https://www.thehomebrewforum.co.uk/...up-yeast-from-bottle-conditioned-beers.53567/