Adding a different yeast after primary...Yay or Nay?

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yeoitsmatt

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So I have this Dreadnought Clone fermenting with an English ale yeast. I pitched it about 2 weeks ago. I dry hopped it with a a good amount of columbus and whatever else i felt like throwing in there from the fridge...(all in all 3.5oz).
I don't plan on moving it off the yeast cake (English Ale WL) and I was wondering if i could pitch some California Ale WL yeast on it after the English falls out of suspension? What would it do? Would it remove the dry hopping aromas if fermentation were to pick up again?
 
Did you not like the answer you got in the Fermentation and Yeast section?
 
no i didn't... that was hardly an answer. I want to know if it will actually do anything. Lets say i have a gravity of 1.025... will the new yeast bring that down? Will it affect the flavor in a good way??
 
How about "It depends"?

Your mostly fermented beer is filled with alcohol and devoid of oxygen. That means you'll get little to no yeast growth. Whatever yeast you do pitch will do their best to eat up any remaining sugars, but they will be a lot less effective at it then they would be if they had a healthy start. If they only get going enough to drop the FG a point or 2, I don't think that would have much impact on hop aroma. If this was a low OG beer that just got "stuck" and manage to get some decent activity going, then you could certainly lose some aroma.
 
Sounds like a fun experiment to me. If it does continue to ferment with a different yeast I'd imagine the CO2 produced would drive off your dry hop aroma though.

As for the other yeast, it would probably depend on what fermentable sugars you have left over. What's your expected FG?

Edit: there's a beer by Alagash called "Fours" that they use 4 types of sugar and 4 strains of yeast in. I'd be willing to bet what they actually do is make 4 separate beers and blend them to taste.
 
I jsut got done reading the White LAbs yeast book and if I remember correctly your inital yeast will impart most of your flavor characteristics. If you are going to pitch more yeast they recommend doing it during the later stages of active fermentation.

If you are pitching to kick off a stuck fermentation you probably will not have much luck. There is no O2 in the beer and likely all the highly fermentable sugars have been largely consumed. Plus now there is alcohol in the beer which will retard new yeast growth also.

At most it might drop a few points but if you are looking to drop it 10 points I doubt it.

If you try to add O2 you risk not having the repitched yeast use up the o2 and getting a oxygenated wort which will ruin your beer.
 
Thanks for those responses. I was just curious what would happen.. if anything. I was hoping for possibly imparting a unique flavor but i dont want to run the risk of ruining the beer. My FG is 1.015 and it's nearly there. I was just bored and found some left over yeast in the fridge and thought maybe i would toss it in to see what happens... but i'm not going to do that now.
 
My data is purely anecdotal, but I generally feel that lots of yeast are not good for preserving hop aroma. I was naturally carbonating my IPA's and after about 6-8 weeks the aroma would really start to fade. I hypothesized that the activity of the yeast during carbonation and later, lead to loss of hop aroma. I switched to force carbonating, and the aroma seems to last longer.

Again, this is purely anecdotal. I have not done a controlled experiment to test this. However, my hop aroma does seem to last longer with the lower amount of yeast in the keg.
 
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