Wine Yeasts

Recently I've been playing around with some fruit wines, and becoming more familiar with wine yeasts. I know sometimes champagne yeast is used for higher gravity beers, but are there any interesting applications for other wine yeast strains in beer, and how would they different from ale yeast beers?

Generally wine yeasts are not used in beer making because they don't ferment the more complex sugars. The result would be a high FG (Sweet).

Many wine yeasts will kill regular beer yeasts, so they are also not used together to create different profiles.

When champagne yeast is used in high gravity beers it is usually as a bottling strain. The beer yeast is done at that point, and high gravity wine yeast is added at bottling to ensure the simple bottling sugars are consumed and the bottle carbs.

There's an excellent podcast from The Brewing Network about this topic. Search for Shea Comfort on their site to find it. There are a few wine yeasts that are suitable for beers. I once used a red wine yeast as the primary strain in a highly experimental brew - it worked just fine, but it was hard to discern what flavors it provided given everything else I did to it (Brett, oak, cranberries). Definitely worth looking into if you want to try something different.

JLem said:

There's an excellent podcast from The Brewing Network about this topic. Search for Shea Comfort on their site to find it. There are a few wine yeasts that are suitable for beers. I once used a red wine yeast as the primary strain in a highly experimental brew - it worked just fine, but it was hard to discern what flavors it provided given everything else I did to it (Brett, oak, cranberries). Definitely worth looking into if you want to try something different.

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Thanks for the heads up, I'll check it out.

Seems like something homebrewers could fool around with.