[narvin]

Not everywhere is as cool as foggy londontown.  If your house is in the low 70s, it's too warm for most of the strains the average homebrewer uses.  YMMV, use your own judgement, etc.

[skyler]

I was planning on trying it out soon. I know it is meant for hazies, but the "vanilla" flavor described sounds more like it would be nice in a dark beer. Since I love me some London III in a brown ale or porter, anyway, I thought I might do a nice American Brown Ale and then use some of the slurry for a Hazy IPA since I haven't made one in a while and I need to prove my street cred to my next door neighbors.

Where did you see vanilla?

Here: https://www.lallemandbrewing.com/en/united-states/news/new-product-announcement-lalbrew-verdant-ipa/

[clibit]

I am fairly certain that London Ale III is a single cell isolate.  Does the Verdant sub-isolate floc to the top like London Ale III?

Yes, very much so, great top cropper. And I'm pouring super bright beer from my bottles. An English bitter, cos I'm English. The beer has a very smooth, rounded quality, good malt expression. I have two other beers awaiting packaging that used repitched, top cropped Verdant, I make mini batches. A porter, and a pale ale hopped with Riwaka and Centennial.

[Northern_Brewer]

There's a picture of it here : https://www.thehomebrewforum.co.uk/threads/verdant-ipa-yeast.90467/#post-962893

[duelerx]

I was literally shocked when I used Devon 1.  I had never dealt with a British yeast strain that was as POF+ as that strain....Sussex 1 was also POF+.

 
Devon1 is supposedly from Hanlons. Sussex1 is supposedly from Harvey's. Their current yeast originally came from John Smith's in 1957 and a 1981 isolate has been sequenced and is a saison type most closely related to WLP038 Manchester (a rare vault strain which people on HBT seem to like a lot, lockdown has meant my vial has been sat in a fridge a long way away, so I haven't tried it yet). But it does seem to be another example where the "British saisons" can get very phenolic in a closed fermenter, but the aeration they get in the breweries with long experience of using them commercially, largely suppresses the phenolics.

I am fairly certain that London Ale III is a single cell isolate.  Does the Verdant sub-isolate floc to the top like London Ale III?

Oh, I'm sure it was a single-cfu isolate originally, but that doesn't mean that a homogenous pitch reaches the brewer. Per Verdant :
"We originally used a generic London Ale III yeast from a bigger yeast bank, but after conducting tests we found that it had other strains in the sample that definitely weren’t helpful for the juicy IPAs we tend to make. Our current supplier offered to isolate the London Ale III yeast and propagate it for us, which went extremely well for many batches"

My impression was that in the mid-teens at least, the pitches that reached brewers were generally not as pure as people might think. Chris Giles from Surebrew has found several flocc variants in US-05 (and he may well have been working with Verdant, they're one of the main suppliers of yeast to small breweries here) and a number of people found a lot of pastorianus-like yeast in Nottingham. I suspect that the Left Hand lawsuit over contaminated WLP090 in 2017 was just the tip of an iceberg, and that there's been quite a lot of work on QA quietly going on in the background since then. Just in the last few weeks, there's been a couple of people on HBT complaining about phenolics from Lallemand kolsch - you obviously never know from a forum thread whether that's just a brewhouse contamination, but it seems to be too widespread for that.

I have a question; namely, what is the average ground water temperature in England?  Does it remain under 18C year round? You guys are above the 50th parallel.  If the Gulf Stream did not exist, you would experience much colder temperatures.

It is probably sufficient to say that it's not something we ever worry about - the heat pump people here work on the assumption of 10C at 6m depth year-round. The fact that we're an island also helps - London may be north of Calgary but even without the Gulf Stream, we'd be more like Vancouver Island than the Rockies.

I love British malts and love Saison strains, a British Saison beer sounds like a winner to me.

[Saccharomyces]

Yes, very much so, great top cropper. And I'm pouring super bright beer from my bottles. An English bitter, cos I'm English. The beer has a very smooth, rounded quality, good malt expression. I have two other beers awaiting packaging that used repitched, top cropped Verdant, I make mini batches. A porter, and a pale ale hopped with Riwaka and Centennial.

That is what I wanted to hear.  I ordered some of this yeast today.

[Saccharomyces]

There's a picture of it here : https://www.thehomebrewforum.co.uk/threads/verdant-ipa-yeast.90467/#post-962893

That is not what I think of when I think top-cropper.   Does it produce a head like this culture?



That is NCYC 1333. I acquired the culture on slant directly from the NCYC (yes, it was expensive.)  It is a Yorkshire culture, most likely John or Sam Smith, but it could be Tetley's.

[clibit]

I ferment in buckets and the krausen does look like that from the top, Sacc.

The bitter I made has turned out fruitier than I expected. The Endeavour and Brewer's Gold hpps provided a lot of dark fruit and the yeast seems to have added stone fruit. I will factor that into future brews.

Attenuation was 74%, yeast from the packet.

I bottled a porter today, tasted promising, 75%, re-pitch with top cropped yeast.

And I bottled an APA today, also good, 75%, re-pitch with top cropped yeast.

I've another bitter to bottle, not taken a reading yet. Just trying to get a handle on this yeast. It is great to work with, I just hope it makes beer I really like in the styles I like the most. The two beers bottled today seem good, and the second bitter too. The first bitter is very smooth and rounded, even in its infancy, just overly fruity for me. Early days, but Verdant IPA a far cry from dried yeast of old, in performance and flavour, from my initial impressions. It may end up being used more for English styles that NEIPAs, possibly? Back to its roots. Looking forward to hearing other opinions.

[Saccharomyces]

If you keep repitching the culture, it will adapt to your brewery and the way you crop. The beauty of top-cropping is that the yeast is healthier and one does not have to deal with break or any hop material that made its way into the fermentation vessel. Another interesting tidbit is that top-cropped yeast has a lower non-brewing yeast microbial load because wild yeast and bacteria do not floc to the top. That is why top-cropped yeast can be repitched so many more times than bottom-cropped yeast.  The important thing to do is skim and discard the brown head and try to take your crop from the second head midway through the fermentation.

[clibit]

If you keep repitching the culture, it will adapt to your brewery and the way you crop. The beauty of top-cropping is that the yeast is healthier and one does not have to deal with break or any hop material that made its way into the fermentation vessel. Another interesting tidbit is that top-cropped yeast has a lower non-brewing yeast microbial load because wild yeast and bacteria do not floc to the top. That is why top-cropped yeast can be repitched so many more times than bottom-cropped yeast.  The important thing to do is skim and discard the brown head and try to take your crop from the second head midway through the fermentation.

That is my way of doing things. If the Verdant makes beers that I like I will use it regularly and crop in this way.

We once discussed the 1318 strain on Jim's and you defended the MrMalty brewery source list. 1318 has been placed in the Whitbread group of strains by DNA sequencing, and Whitbread bought the Boddingtons brewery in 1987. Did the original sample pre-date this, or not, do you know? Perhaps it's a replacement strain from Whitbread, the original Bodds culture was apparently replaced in the 80s.

The DNA work is casting some doubt on some of the Mr Malty sources I think? 1028 and 013, for example, not close. 013 is instead close to 006. 1728 and 028 are distanced too. 1275 and 023, allegedly both Brakspear, but very different. I gave up trusting any of the info ages ago tbh, and the testing programme seems to justify that decision, but I'm sure the list wasn't all wrong. That said, 1968 and 002 are grouped together on the latest Suregork chart, and weren't on the previous one. So maybe the testing isn't quite the exact science I thought it was, or the interpretation at least.

The names are odd though, Bodds being called London for example. 1275/023 called Burton and Thames Valley. Who did the geography?

[Saccharomyces]

The DNA work is casting some doubt on some of the Mr Malty sources I think?

Or could it be that breweries routinely exchanged yeast cultures leading to mixed genetic admixture? We are dealing with cultures in hindsight. How many mixed cultures ended up being plated to a single isolate? I am one of the early brewers who plated Ringwood. I did not know that it was a multi-strain culture when I plated it. However, I transferred multiple well isolated colonies to different slants. The result was hit or miss brewing.  I eventually grew tired of brewing question marks, so I discarded all of the slants I made from that culture. Are the strains in banks from the claimed breweries, I believe so. However, what is left to ponder is are the available cultures representative of the original?  That is up to the user to ascertain. Any culture that is serially repitched over time is going to end up with variants. How those variants factor into the final equation is brewery dependent.  It is what we think of when we think house flavor.

[clibit]

Thanks for the response and yes, it's obviously a complicated scenario. It's impossible to unpick the past movement of strains. I'm sure the selection of different strains from multi-strain originals is a factor. Why would they call a Boddington's strain London Ale though? How could that come about? And, if 1275 and 023 both came from a Brakspear's beer, why would one be called Burton and the other Thames Valley?

[Saccharomyces]

Whitbread appears to have had a large culture collection at one point.  There are number of Whitbread Cultures that came from from other breweries.  Charrington is a good example.  Whitbread SC16 is a single-cell isolate of Charrington's yeast culture.

    NCYC 241
 
    Information        Single colony culture of Charrington's brewery yeast (Whitbread's SC16).
    Depositor            B.M. Brown
    Deposit Name      Saccharomyces cerevisiae
    Month of deposit  June
    Deposit Year        1951
    Habitat                Ale production yeast
 

[BeerfanOz]

First batch with this yeast, a bitter, is now in secondary and tastes great. Definitely a top cropping yeast haha. Dumped a Columbus pale ale on 1/3 of the cake and it’s fermenting a few hours later and has a massive Krausen. Very impressed for a dry yeast, in terms of yeast character. Can’t wait to taste, probably put the bitter through my nitro tap

[clibit]

I've now tasted 3 beers with this yeast after 2 to 4 weeks in the bottle and they are all really good. A London porter, an English bitter and a dry hopped pale ale with Riwaka and Centennial. Really happy with all three. Could be a house yeast if you are that way inclined, methinks.