Help/Thoughs on Making a Stout w/ a Wine Yeast Slurry

[tupton]

Hey Everyone,

I've got a about a cup of wine yeast slurry from a Chocolate Raspberry Port kit wine. It's a fantastic tasting wine and I'm trying to come up with the best way to incorporate it into a Stout recipe to essentially blend those flavors into a typical stout.

Looking for opinions or suggestions on what might work best. Should I toss it into the end of the boil, rack onto it after primary fermentation, other suggestions?

Thanks for any help/insights!

-Tim

 

[ten80]

Funny you ask, I just listened to the 11-03-08 Sunday Session podcast where Shae Comfort talked about the use of wine yeasts for beers. Long story short, wine yeasts do not metabolize maltose and maltotriose sugars from beer, so pitching a wine yeast first will result in an under-attenuated beer with some wine yeast flavor.

Pitching a beer yeast after the wine yeast doesn't work well because all but one wine yeast produce the "killer" protein which inhibits growth of other non-wine yeasts.

So, what Shae suggested was to split a batch and pitch a highly attenuative yeast in one half and pitch a flavorful wine yeast in the other. Blend the finished products and you may get what you want, but it can be tricky.

another alternative would be to pitch a beer yeast first, let it ferment nearly to completion, then pitch a wine yeast and add some dextrose for the wine yeast to ferment. Not sure how well this would work.

I brewed 10 gallons of stout last week and pitched SF04 into each 5-gal carboy and pitched some left over EC1118 champagne yeast into .5 gallons I collected from the bottom of my kettle. I seriously over-pitched the EC1118 to see if it would attenuate out the beer. EC1118 FG plateau'ed at 1.037. I was able to hit 1.022 (same as SF04-fermented beer) only after adding 1/4 tsp amylase enzyme. Flavor is similar to the fully fermented beer, but slightly cleaner. Adding amylase after the boil may risk infection as amylase enzyme powder can contain some of the bacteria it was derived from.

 

[WillyB]

since ten80 just covered the yeast portion, i have a few suggestions you may have already thought about. One, you could just add the port to the secondary of your favorite stout recipe. a second thought I had was that you could cook down a bottle of the port and add the syrup to the secondary. It might be nice if you cooked the port down with raspberries and chocolate as well, adding additional flavor. However, if you are going to add port, as far as the stout goes, I would suggest something with a decent roasted bite and a dry, well-attenuating yeast.