Safkvass where to get

I was reading about kvass, and The fermentation process I use is very similar, pitch wait a day refrigerate. I want to try the Safale kvass yeast, because the ale yeast seems to start to produce intermediate off flavors after a couple days. However, I can't seem to find a distributed that carries that strain or similar.

A quick search leads me to believe there is no separate yeast strain. Kvass is a low alcohol drink made with bread. One site had a recipe and they used US05 yeast. Another used s-04.

kh54s10 said:

A quick search leads me to believe there is no separate yeast strain. Kvass is a low alcohol drink made with bread. One site had a recipe and they used US05 yeast. Another used s-04.

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Nope. It exists. Never heard of it until now, but here it is:

http://www.fermentis.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/120413-Safkvas-c-73_Eng.pdf

Are you sure you want 20kg of a specialty yeast? (look where it says Packaging) Have you tried bread yeast?

I will be making my first kvass in near future. I will do a wild ferment with a sort of sourdough culture. Otherwise most folks use bread yeast.

z-bob said:

Are you sure you want 20kg of a specialty yeast? (look where it says Packaging) Have you tried bread yeast?

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I'm sure that I don't.

dmtaylor said:

I will be making my first kvass in near future. I will do a wild ferment with a sort of sourdough culture. Otherwise most folks use bread yeast.

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I did try using a bakers yeast before, now that Ithink about it did work out, I might try it with my improved wort to see how that turns out. Thinking about the way bakers yeast is used fermenting/rising for part of a day actually makes sense. I am interested in doing a wild capture, though without either baking or fermenting to high alcohol concentrations, I have safety concerns.

5mooth0perator said:

I am interested in doing a wild capture, though without either baking or fermenting to high alcohol concentrations, I have safety concerns.

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Nothing in a wild fermentation can kill you. Botulism only happens after long-term storage in an anerobic environment -- we're talking almost a year for that to happen. Kvass on the other hand is consumed very fast, typically within a week and not much longer than that before it turns into a true sour beer of several percent alcohol.

dmtaylor said:

Nothing in a wild fermentation can kill you. Botulism only happens after long-term storage in an anerobic environment -- we're talking almost a year for that to happen. Kvass on the other hand is consumed very fast, typically within a week and not much longer than that before it turns into a true sour beer of several percent alcohol.

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Ok good to know. The next question is how to capture the wild flavor that I want? I'm not too interested in a souring effect. I was thinking maybe honey would have some yeasty like things that would provide a nice incomplete fermentation flavor in a very sweet environment with many types of sugars. I would guess that yeasts from honey would be less likely to produce nasty off flavors, because they would have to live in it, whereas things that are optimized for wort can count on it being diluted.

I've had both good and bad effects from wild yeast in honey. For insurance, I'd use my own yeast culture either from a pack of commercial yeast, bread yeast, or from something like a sourdough bread culture where I had the experience to know that it would taste okay. Otherwise, you could end up with something tasting like vomit or worse. It will probably turn out fine... but not a guarantee.

Regarding sourness, I believe that takes several days or weeks to develop. It should not be noticeable when the kvass is very young. That being said, I haven't made a kvass yet, so then I don't know for certain. However I have brewed wild beers before and they went sour pretty quickly, within like a week or so.

dmtaylor said:

I've had both good and bad effects from wild yeast in honey. For insurance, I'd use my own yeast culture either from a pack of commercial yeast, bread yeast, or from something like a sourdough bread culture where I had the experience to know that it would taste okay. Otherwise, you could end up with something tasting like vomit or worse. It will probably turn out fine... but not a guarantee.

Regarding sourness, I believe that takes several days or weeks to develop. It should not be noticeable when the kvass is very young. That being said, I haven't made a kvass yet, so then I don't know for certain. However I have brewed wild beers before and they went sour pretty quickly, within like a week or so.

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I did several ginger beers from a ginger bug/wild capture. They were pretty good, but had one go super sour, I was trying to see how long to let it go. After the third day it just suddenly became undrinkable. The ginger plant is a known bacteria yeast symbiontic relationship. My GBP starters took a while to get going. I think if I do wild capture again I would try to isolate the culture that I want. There used to be suppliers. I would prefer to find some local sources for cultures though.

z-bob said:

Are you sure you want 20kg of a specialty yeast? (look where it says Packaging) Have you tried bread yeast?

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Bread yeast for the win

Started bubbling with carbonation by the next day. The ale yeast turned over but didn't bubble. No sour off flavors from incomplete fermentation. The flavor was noticeably more yeasty like nutritional yeast or bread. I think the ale yeast sort of works in stages generating many of certain enzymes at a time then moving on whereas the bread yeast does it end to end.

I would still like to try the kvass yeast there have to be other yeasts and yeast flavors from yeasts that ferment like this.

After improving my process by removing chloramine and adding yeast nutrient making a starter, I've gotten ale yeast to clean up but still a little sour. I went back and tried the bakers yeast again. I get some sulfur out of it, though it does a much better job of carbing. After several days the ale yeast is still flat. Though, I am starting get what the Kvas description might have meant by "balanced", the bakers yeast seems to create a larger number of off flavors in small amounts eg balanced.

It makes me wonder though, maybe Champaigne yeast would have less sulfur, but thinking about it a bit, I seem to remember having a bit of a sulfur flavor in commercially made champaignes.

If I was going to use wine yeast to make beer, I'd try K1-V1116. It allegedly ferments complex sugars that most wine yeasts can't.

Here's my kvass that I made a month ago. I did end up using Red Star bread yeast.



The sulfur only lasted for about a week. After 4 weeks it is now quite clean with a much more mellow breadiness than it had a few weeks ago. It didn't even go sour like I expected. It is, however, beginning to exhibit very slight oxidation. I'll need to drink it up quickly now to avoid more severe oxidation, which won't be too difficult, as I do enjoy it. Next time I'll try a wild ferment. I would also be very interested to try Wyeast 1007, I really love the bready flavors of that yeast.

Cheers.

Haven't made kvass myself, but a Finnish version called kotikalja which i guess is quite similar. It's made from roasted rye malt and table sugar and usually fermented for a day or two with bread yeast to keep it sweet and low in alcohol. The rye malt and sugar are mixed together in boiling water (no mashing or true boil) and left to cool before pitching yeast.

I thought that it would be an easy way to test different yeast strains so i split a batch between us-05, s-04, wy1187, wy3711 and bread yeast. I couldn't taste differences after 2 days because of sweetness so i let them ferment out. Here are my brief impressions that i recall:

Us-05: dry and boring taste with muted malt flavor.

S-04: fuller mouthfeel and better maltiness than us-05. Nice esters which provided some additional complexity to this simple brew.

Wy1187: bit similar than s-04 in mouthfeel and maltiness, but cleaner (not that much esters). I made another batch with just s-04 and this and there i actually liked this more.

Wy3711: bit like us-05, nothing like a saison. I had higher expectations for this. I guess when the fermentables are just simple sugars (as in here and also in cider), it's lot cleaner than in wort.

Bread yeast: again, dry and boring. Developed bit of unpleasant tartness with further age, but this finnish type bread yeast is not microbiologically pure.

I tried a saison yeast, vigourous fermentation and quick carbonation, nice balance between clean and flavorful, worked well with spices. I'll see how it holds in the fridge.

Hello everyone!
I'm from Russia, and i was reading this good forum about a year and explore your experience and society!
Get some information, that we don't have and theme and ideas we don't, translate and explain it to my rus friends on beer brewing forums.
So seems like it's a good moment to post my first message. I can try to answer any your questions about kvass. And if you are interesting post a famous rus dish with kvass. Very appreciate and love your forum! Especially some members)))

Kwass yeast is available in 10g sachets from the Gozdawa brand. Apparently it's a repacked Fermentis Safkvas S-73 (or maybe not, as we know now that Fermentis rarely if ever allow their yeasts to be sold rebranded). The Gozdawa version is labelled "Porter&Kwass", the flavour description on their website is vague. Never thought that Kwass was in any way similar to Porter. Gozdawa seem to know more.
I'm tempted to try a Kwass-yeast-fermented "Porter".

Finally, got me some Fermentis Safkvas C-73.
Building now a recipe to use it in. Read a lot on the beverage, in different languages. As I understand now, Kwass differs from the rest of the small farmhouse ales in that it's double fermented: first by Lactobacillus, and then by Cerevisiae or wild strains. Fermentis state their Kwass yeast provides enough acidity so that an additional Lacto fermentation isn't needed.
I tasted homemade Kwass in Latvia and Poland (didn't like it much) and also some darker and sweeter industrial-produced versions in Ukraine (which I liked more).
For my first Kwass recipe, I think I won't follow the traditional sloppy practice of open wild fermentations of stale breadcrumbs. I'll make my small batch of Kwass all-malt (Pale Rye Malt and Fermented Red Rye Malt), boiled, and then fermented under hydrolock, to see what the yeast can achieve. Then will adjust the recipe to replicate the Ukrainian dark Kwasses. Grain to glass in 3 to 5 days, it's an ideal style for experimenting.

Protos said:

Finally, got me some Fermentis Safkvas C-73.
Building now a recipe to use it in. Read a lot on the beverage, in different languages. As I understand now, Kwass differs from the rest of the small farmhouse ales in that it's double fermented: first by Lactobacillus, and then by Cerevisiae or wild strains. Fermentis state their Kwass yeast provides enough acidity so that an additional Lacto fermentation isn't needed.
I tasted homemade Kwass in Latvia and Poland (didn't like it much) and also some darker and sweeter industrial-produced versions in Ukraine (which I liked more).
For my first Kwass recipe, I think I won't follow the traditional sloppy practice of open wild fermentations of stale breadcrumbs. I'll make my small batch of Kwass all-malt (Pale Rye Malt and Fermented Red Rye Malt), boiled, and then fermented under hydrolock, to see what the yeast can achieve. Then will adjust the recipe to replicate the Ukrainian dark Kwasses. Grain to glass in 3 to 5 days, it's an ideal style for experimenting.

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Let us know about the outcome pls!

Will do!

I hope that Kwass, which is between 0.5 and 1.5% ABV, might be a great solution to those who (like me) seek to limit their weekly Alcohol intake without sacrificing the Sacred Daily Stein'o'Homebrew

The good news is that the standard pack size is now only 10kg.... And the new web page is at SafKvas™ C-73

It's interesting, there's a few things catch my attention. The main one is that the picture on that page is a 500g pack which is not available, but which says it is made by Bruggeman in Belgium, who are a bread yeast specialist and a sister company of Fermentis within the Lesaffre group. Lots of Fermentis yeasts are made in Belgium, but I think this is the only one that (currently?) mentions Bruggeman on the label. Something else that is notable is that C-73 is not Easy2Use unlike the main Fermentis yeasts, which might suggest that it is produced by a different process, perhaps one that is less concerned with optimising performance in wort.



So - are they just taking a Bruggeman bread yeast and labelling it as C-73? The C-73 label says it's just S. cerevisiae so they're not using anything exotic like Lachancea or bacteria to get acidity. Might be interesting for someone to try Bruggeman yeast in wort alongside C-73?

As for repacking, there's not a lot that Fermentis can do about the grey market repackers and I imagine that they are fairly relaxed about it given that repacks are not competing against Fermentis retail packs in this case and it means they sell a few more 10kg packs.

What might be more of a problem is that it seems to be mostly sold in Russia, so at the moment supplies may be disrupted by sanctions. Still seem to be Russians offering repackaged small packs if you want to go that route though.

I bought it exactly from Russia, swiftly delivered to Turkey, along with similarly repacked BR-8. From other hard to get strains, they also had on offer two kinds of Fermentis Lactobacillus and a new high-alcohol Fermentis yeast, which I didn't care to order.

Sometimes the ruskies sell pretty unusual yeasts in their stores, like f.ex. MJ M10 Workhorse, long extinct in the First World, which I bought from them a year or two ago.
That's why, when I spend time in my Turkish residence (where I have little to do besides brewing), I always take a peek into Russian online stores and sometimes I find interesting things there.

I don't see any signs of sanctions having effect on their stores. They sell a usual array of fresh European yeasts and grains, and hops from all over the world, including the US. The prices are more or less stable too, so the bastards seem to circumvent the sanctions with ease. Most probably, what they sell are Western exports directed ostensibly to Armenia, Qazaqstan or Turkey, and in fact delivered to Putinland.

Came up with a recipe, brewing it right now, here is it with comments:

RUDZU DZERSIS
(Rye Kwass in Latvian)

Expected OG 1.024

Pale Rye Malt - 1/3 of the grist
Red Fermented Rye Malt (aka Kaljamallas in Finnish Sahti recipes) - 1/3
Rye Flour (didn't want to use adjuncts, but Rye Flour is present in each and every traditional Kwass recipe, so included it too) - 1/3

Mash 30' @48°C (flour made the mash awfully gummy, so a beta-glucan rest is necessary)

Mash 120' @70°C (with so little diastatic Pale malt in the grist, give enzymes an extra time to convert everything. No beta-amylase rest as I don't need much alcohol in this brew).

Boil 15' (just to clarify somewhat the turbid cloudy floury wort)

Safkvas C-73 - 0.2 g/1L
(fermenting for 24 hours under airlock, to exclude wild yeast and Lactos to better assess what C-73 is capable of)

And then will see what to do next. Either cold crashing, or priming, short carbonizing and pasteurizing.

Cheers to all that. My guess is you'll end up with something similar to what is pictured in #15 above, but probably with a much more dense and creamy foam than mine.

It will be also significantly darker, of a red-chocolate hue, because of the Fermented Rye.

Rye Flour. Stuck BIAB sparge (even despite the beta-glucan rest). Now I've seen it all.
After a couple of successful 75% and 100% Rye Roggenbocks I was thinking of myself as of an expert in brewing with Rye. Little did I know how much Rye Flour might humble my expertise. Rye Flour may be good for a traditional unmashed/unsparged/unboiled wild fermentation process, but God forbid you to use it in a classic beer brewing process, at 33.33% of the grist.

Yep, even BIAB is not immune to stuck mash/runoff. Rice hulls are your friend, even in a bag.

It worked with a 100% Rye malt grist after a beta-glucan rest.
But the Rye flour proved to be an overkill.

Massaging the bag during runoff helps! That's how I've unstuck my 70% wheat flour beer... Yours cannot be worse than that one .

No, it didn't! The bag got completely gummed up, just a tiny triclke of droplets running out of it, even when massaged and squeezed. Had to use another two pieces of filtering cloth, a bit too much work for a 6-bottles batch. Lotta flour came out of it into the wort too. Never Rye flour makes its way into my bag again, never. I really didn't understand the point of using it in most malt Kwass recipes. It seems to just add more mud, murk and slime with no particular flavour - nothing that adding more Malted Rye may not achieve without the excessive gumminess.

Protos said:

No, it didn't! The bag got completely gummed up, just a tiny triclke of droplets running out of it, even when massaged and squeezed. Had to use another two pieces of filtering cloth, a bit too much work for a 6-bottles batch. Lotta flour came out of it into the wort too. Never Rye flour makes its way into my bag again, never. I really didn't understand the point of using it in most malt Kwass recipes. It seems to just add more mud, murk and slime with no particular flavour - nothing that adding more Malted Rye may achieve without the excessive gumminess.

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It's probably just cheaper.....

Yep, most probably.
Just 33% of diastatic Pale Rye Malt perfectly saccharified the rest of the grist, 100% extract efficiency. "Why then wasting more of it", probably used to say grumpy peasants of the Northeast European Rye Belt

The Kwass is ready.
Seems logical to continue in a dedicated thread.