BeerBorg

mashani wrote:Their London ESB is great IMHO. BUT unless you actually want a chewy/high FG beer.....

That's interesting.
Over at Barclay Perkins a number of the older English high gravity beers have a high FG, due to the mash temperature per Ron.

The_Professor wrote:

mashani wrote:Their London ESB is great IMHO. BUT unless you actually want a chewy/high FG beer.....

That's interesting.
Over at Barclay Perkins a number of the older English high gravity beers have a high FG, due to the mash temperature per Ron.

Yeah, and you will still end up with a high FG even using sugar in typical English proportions (vs. epic 20% Belgian proportions) if you mash at medium and high temperatures. That yeast leaves behind all of the Maltotriose, which is something like 10% or 15% or maybe even more of the sugars if you mash at warmer temperatures. IE with this yeast if you mash at 147 without sugar you still will end up with a beer that will be like you mashed at 154.

So unless you use 10-15% or more sugar for all of your grain bill, you will still end up with a higher FG then "normal" with many other yeast strains. As you know (since you read Barclay Perkins) those older English ales, especially WW1-WW2 years often had some % of sugar in them.

I personally am OK with this, I'm not a low FG/high attenuation focused weenie. But lots of Americans seem to think that if you don't get high attenuation your beer is ruined somehow. Hence all of the bad reviews of this yeast. (some of which are funny, IE they say it tastes nice, but bitch because of the FG/they don't have as much alcohol as they expected so they give it 1 star ratings even though it tasted nice). Anyways, that's just why I said unless you want a chewy beer, mash at low temps, it's a 'Merican warning.

Anyways, I actually used London ESB once to intentionally get a super pineapple flavored Brett C beer, since it left my house Brett C a hella lot to eat. That would potentially be the one other downside of this yeast, if your sanitation isn't good, there is gonna be a lot of stuff for the bugs to eat.

Thanks for the info mashani. I do plan on using this sometime, it would probably be great for an English Mild or Ordinary Bitter. Is this one a slow starter as well?

MadBrewer wrote:Thanks for the info mashani. I do plan on using this sometime, it would probably be great for an English Mild or Ordinary Bitter. Is this one a slow starter as well?

No, it gets going pretty quick at least if your fermenting at real ale temperatures (IE say 66-70) like you should be when using a yeast like this.

My LHBS just got in a large amount of the Kveik yeast from Lallemand. Next time I'm there I'll grab some. It's the Voss strain (not sure if that was mentioned here) and I've only used the Hornindal strain in liquid form so I'm interested in trying this one out over the summer.