Isn’t wb06 supposed to be a weizen yeast?
It's marketed as such although it's completely unrelated to the hefe yeast and is actually a member of the saison family, most closely related to strains that are meant to have originated at Duvel. It's a beast for biotransformation, it's so active that it completely trashes hop flavour IME.
From what everyone has told me is that blending yeast can be unpredictable and one strain will become dominant.
You're thinking more of what happens over time if you repitch, it's not such a concern the first time you mix, as here.
From what I understand, using one yeast to ferment with and brettanomyces to package with was (maybe still is?) standard practice in British beer. The desired result was the flavor impact. They even named it ‘brettanomyces’ because of this practice.
Up until the 19th century it was standard practice everywhere to ferment with a multistrain - the first gyle with a single strain of yeast was brewed at Carlsberg on 12 November 1883 under Hansen's direction. And traditional British breweries have generally proved fairly resistant to the idea of single strains and still brew with multistrains (but all Saccharomyces), although most were cleaned up during the move to CCVs in the 1970s to make them easier to manage, eg Adnams went from 5 strains to 2 strains. Part of that is you need them for the complexity they bring, British styles rely more on yeast contribution than many others, and also it's hard to get the brewing performance you need from a single strain when you're looking for both commercially acceptable levels of attenuation and good flocculation for cask-conditioned beer.
They never "used Brettanomyces" to "package with" as such - but in the mid 19th-century stock beer was routinely aged for 6+ months in wooden barrels/tuns that inevitably were contaminated with a whole zoo of wild yeasts, including
Brettanomyces. Although the UK had largely moved on from the practice of long ageing by the time Hansen was promoting the idea of single strain yeasts, British brewers (with a couple of exceptions such as the long-gone Chester's of Manchester and Combe's) found that single strains didn't match their idea of what their beers "should" taste like.
There's some extant examples of traditionally aged beers in Britain that are aged to pick up a bit of funk - Harvey's Imperial Stout is one, although in that case the main wild yeast is a
Debaryomyces - but it's not been a mainstream thing for over a century.
Does anyone blend different yeasts to obtain a unique flavor profile?
I have 2 US-05 and 1 WB-06. Both are ale yeasts obviously. WB-06 is a wheat yeast. I need 3 pkg's total of US-05 but only have 2. I thought I could use the WB-06 in the recipe but wasn't sure on the outcome.
Again, does anyone blend yeasts? If so, what is your opinions on this blend.
As I say, multistrains are the norm among British family brewers, and it's not uncommon to mix dry yeasts among the more forward-thinking breweries that are too small to have their own yeast labs, but in the UK it's more about combining the flavour of something like Windsor with the flocculation performance of eg Nottingham. There's
a massive thread over on HBT devoted to untangling the yeast that Tree House use(d) in star beers like Julius, which may (have) be(en) a mix of S-04, T-58 and WB-06 - but in proportions of around 85:10:5 respectively. As I say, IME you've got to be really careful with WB-06 as it tends to trash hop flavour, certainly if it's 33% of a yeast blend it will tend to take over.
Topic: Mixing dry yeasts (Read 1957 times)
