Mixing different yeasts

This is idle curiosity more than something I have any actual plans to try anytime soon, but I was wondering if there are any reasons why it would make sense to pitch a blend of more than one type of yeast?

White Labs sell a couple of blended yeast types, but I've never seen people talking about making their own blends. It would obviously be expensive to buy more than one bottled yeast, but seems like mixing your own could be reasonable if you are saving and washing yeast from previous brews.

Is this a valid technique? Any interesting effects to be achieved thereby? Or is it just too random and unpredictable as to which strain will take off and dominate the brew?

Ive read a little about this. It is perfectly fine. I think you would get flavors and charactoristics of both strains

tdavisii said:

Ive read a little about this. It is perfectly fine. I think you would get flavors and charactoristics of both strains

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That's precisely why you'd do it.

you can get characteristics of both strains you can also use a second strain to dry out a batch that finished too high. you can pitch two yeasts at once, or one then the other later on, or make a split batch one with each yeast then blend them together after fermentation. all the different methods will give different results.

you could pitch an ale yeast to ferment for a short time, then cool and pitch a lager yeast after the ale goes dormant.

just throwing that in there

You can also add a different yeast and cask condition with that yeast. So you could do a 10 gallon batch and cask condition in 2 different kegs with 2 different conditioning yeasts.

^^^ is a very common practice with naturally-conditioned beers.

Cheers,

Bob