slarkin712
Well-Known Member
This may be trivial, but this just came to me. Is there any advantage to using wheat DME over pilsen DME when making a yeast starter for a German weiss? I usually cold crash and decant my starters before pitching, so not much of the starter beer goes into the fermentor. I know that German wheat yeast is unique in the way that that it produces certain flavors in the presence of wheat. So if I use a DME other than wheat DME for a starter might it condition out this special interaction German wheat yeast has with wheat? In other words, if German wheat yeast is fermented without any wheat present might the yeast lose/change its ability to produce these flavors from wheat? I really don't think it matters, but I always use pilsen DME for my yeast starters and I don't get really strong banana clove flavors in my German weiss. I've done other things in my processes to try to get these flavors, so I don't want to really get into that. So who uses wheat DME for their German weiss yeast starters?
