Liquid Yeast vs. Dry?

What are the benefits of liquid over dry? Vice versa? What do you use?

I'd say about 80% of my beers I use dry yeast. US-05 for most American styles, S-04 or Nottingham for English styles, T-58 for some of my Belgian styles, although because the yeast has such a huge impact on the flavor of Belgians that's where I end up using the most liquid yeast.

Dry yeast is much easier to work with in my opinion. Also, a fresh packet of dry yeast typically has way more healthy yeast cells than a vial or smack pack of liquid yeast, so you don't need to make a starter for most beers. And they are cheaper than liquid yeast to boot. So even for high gravity stuff where you'd normally make a big starter using liquid yeast, you can just pitch a couple packets of dry yeast and still come out the same in terms of cost.

Here you go...there's plenty of threads just like this. But I put some links in here.

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f163/dry-vs-liquid-yeast-185480/

This has been beaten to death on this forum.

Seems that it boils down to personal preference and the need for style specific yeast (most of which are only available in liquid form).

weirdboy said:

And they are cheaper than liquid yeast to boot. So even for high gravity stuff where you'd normally make a big starter using liquid yeast, you can just pitch a couple packets of dry yeast and still come out the same in terms of cost.

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You come out ahead with dry yeast since it is cheaper than not only liquid yeast but DME as well.

logan3825 said:

You come out ahead with dry yeast since it is cheaper than not only liquid yeast but DME as well.

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Depends on the relative pricing, but yeah.


Of course one can always reuse their yeast (liquid or dry) to ameliorate costs as well, but dry yeast is still much easier to work with. I have 20 packets of dry yeast sitting in a little baggie next to the eggs in my fridge. If I had 20 vials of yeast in my fridge my wife would kill me.