different yeasts

have just been reading the wiki and have noticed the many many different yeasts am looking to make a few different ciders and appfelwein , was wondering what the "best" all round yeast was?
from what i have read was planning on using champagne yeast , any reason why this would be inapropriate? any better/nicer tasting alternatives?
have read posts where people have reused yeast cakes , wondered how many times a cake can be reused effectivly
cheers
carl

For a true-to-style Apfelwein, the yeast to use is a Montrachet wine yeast. Some people (do a search) have had very good results using various Weisen and Witbier yeasts - 3068 Weihenstephan comes to mind. It apparently gives a sweeter/fruitier cider as opposed to a bone-dry Apfelwein.

In terms of reusing a yeast cake, the best mileage seems to come from washing and reusing a yeast cake, which people often take to five generations and get ~5 batches per generation. People also just repitch on an old yeast cake, but I don't think anyone takes that past 2 generations (or else you'd be massively overpitching).

Look around and read! These are questions that have been discussed at length all over this site. You can learn a lot just by lurking or searching.

Well, there are many different types of wine and cider yeasts. I keep a few on hand, but use mostly champagne yeast, cotes de blanc, and montrachet. They are cheap and convenient. The strains all ferment, but some will leave the cider a bit "fruitier" or drier than others.

From Jack Keller's website, here are some characteristics of some of the most common yeast strains: http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/strains.asp

I've never reused a yeast cake from wine or cider. I do it all the time for beer. The reason I don't do it for wine is because either I've used a cheap dry yeast and it's not worth it, or if it's a fruit wine, I have lots of gross lees in the yeast cake. I imagine you could do it, if you needed to, of you had a very expensive yeast strain you wanted to save.