Yeast Selection Help

I recently toured New Belgium, great tour by the way, and they had an apple wheat that I wanted to try and clone. I emailed them for help and this is what I got.

Hi Brian

Thanks for the kudos. The malt bill was pretty simple. About 2/3rds of it were pale malt, and the other 1/3rd was equally divided between wheat, golden oats, and honey malt. I lightly hopped it at the beginning of the boil with Target hops for bittering and preservation. I used super fresh unpasteurized apple cider from a local orchard , and added just after the boil as we wanted to pasteurize it but not strip the flavor. Fermentation took about 6 days using one of our house ale yeasts. Any clean low estery ale yeast would probably suffice. Hope this helps and happy brewing!


From this I put together this simple recipe.

6lbs Pale 2-row
1lb Wheat Malt
1lb Honey Malt
1lb Oats-Malted
0.33oz Target @60min
0.5 gal Apple Cider @0min

I don't know much about different yeast strands so I was wondering what a good clean low ester yeast would be for this wheat? Thanks for the help

Nice of them to give you some helpful info. I'd say use us05, wyeast1056, or wlp001. All are clean with virtually no esters.

I like the low hopping. When the brewer said preservation, I thought that was a clue to low hopping.

I would use an english strain. (S04, 002, 1098)

You will lose a lot of apple flavor with a Cali yeast (56, 1056, 001). I have a feeling this is a beer you don't want to attenuate very well from my experience with cider.

Though, it sort of depends how dry the beer was, if it was a light apple flavor and a dry beer, use 1056. If it was a pronounced apple flavor and a sweeter beer, id go English.

Not a big fan of the California strains, they're incredibly boring, and sort of a crutch for most brewers. Go with a Northwest strain for a little bit of ester character, but not as much as an English strain.

I usually use S05 but I'm thinking for this beer it is going to attenuate to much. This was a sweeter beer with plenty of apple flavor.

Will the S04 attenuate less and leave this beer a little sweeter than the S05?
Is S04 going to give it too many esters?

WLP001 or WY1056.

The man said clean, low ester ale yeast. Yes you could use these other yeasts and make a great tasting beer, but it would not be a clone. It all depends on what you want to do. I would do it the way that he said and then decide if you would change anything next time. Basically, why ask for the recipe and then change it anyway?