"Cask bitter"? He didn't say "cask" or "bitter" (and neither did I). He said "it will give you a drier finish which is essential for the English Ale style," which is just wrong. If he had said "which is essential for English cask bitters," I would have just thought "okay, that may or may not be true, but why are you talking about cask bitters when I'm asking about yeast for a Northern English-style brown ale?"
Because there's no such thing as a special yeast for brown ale - breweries would just use their house yeast, and the stats for cask bitter are a way to get an idea of what their house yeasts were like in a reasonably standardised recipe. Indeed, in many cases the brown ale didn't just use the same yeast but was the same actual beer, just the bitter or mild with some caramel to colour it up a bit. That certainly seems to be the case for the earliest commercial brown ale that Ron has found that he can match to a recipe book (
Fuller's in 1909), before then
"nut-brown ale" seems to have little more than a romantic phrase for just "beer" in poetry and songs. One can imagine that adding caramel to an existing beer to create another brand probably started soon after the Free Mash Tun Act of 1880 gave more freedom around adding sugar products to beer.
I personally think of British brown ales as being largely divided into Northern English and Southern English styles, but the thing is, even that simplifies it too much. I could expand it to include London brown ales,
It needs repeating - despite the current survivors (or not), Michael Jackson's distinction between northern and southern brown ales is nonsense. You could get
Pompey Double Brown at 5.7% ABV and 84% aa in Portsmouth, and Maxim at 3.7% and 72% from Vaux in Sunderland - and sometimes both styles from the same brewery, Vaux being one example.
Tennants of Sheffield and Sam Smiths were also in the "sweet, weak" camp. So a geographical split makes no sense. Ron prefers Brown Ale and Double Brown Ale, with a slightly arbitrary dividing line around 1042º, whereas Martyn Cornell (RIP) viewed Newcastle Brown as just another strong bitter in the same family as Riggwelter etc :
And then if you want more reading on the subject, Ron brings the detail :
https://barclayperkins.blogspot.com/search/label/Brown Ale
My response might have come across as a bit antagonistic, but that's because the assumption in the question was that I was making a US take on a British style,
But there was no such assumption, Zadkiel was just trying to clarify what the question was. In fact it was you making the assumption (that there was an assumption in the question), rather than Zadkiel. But in any case, maybe it's a good idea to give people the benefit of the doubt when you don't know them and are in a medium where nuance is notoriously difficult, rather than allowing yourself to be "rubbed the wrong way" and become "antagonistic"?
you might debate whether it's even a real style, but just like music styles and so on, it's easy for the sake of simplicity in explaining what you're making
See the Cornell article - there comes a point when you're adding "clothes horse" and "seahorse" to a horse category because of the name, where the category becomes rather meaningless. Frankly, if Newky Brown is what you're trying to clone, just say so, in the same way that people say they're going for Orval or SNPA.
In my case, I stopped using liquid yeast years ago, but even if I wanted to use liquid yeasts now, the really unfortunate thing is that I don't really have much access to them. I could get the really mainstream liquid yeasts like WLP005 for a very high price, but I couldn't get Ringwood or Burton Ale or Manchester or Thames Valley or Essex Ale or West Yorkshire or so on.
Well I'm well aware that people have all sorts of reasons for not using liquid yeasts, and living somewhere without good homebrew retailers is obviously one of them, so I'm always careful to not imply people are "l0s3rs" for doing so. At the same time, one can't really get away from the fact that for British beers, dry yeasts are a bit meh in comparison to alternatives. If I had to use dry yeast for a commercial golden ale tomorrow, I'd probably use MJ M36 Liberty Bell, if the requirement was for a brown/black beer for competition (so emphasis more on standing out rather than mass-market appeal) and I had time to make a test beer, I'd probably do tests with different combinations of T-58 ("super-Windsor") and BE-256.
I guess in your situation, one very obvious option to get good yeast would be to see if you could harvest from the likes of Fuller's 1845 or Rochefort 10 - don't know how easy they are to get in good condition with you, maybe if you have British friends who could get 1845 fresh from home, or maybe if you ever travel to Oz/HK/Singapore their British connections may give you more options in beer shops? Or find local homebrewers who may be able to share yeast? Rochefort dregs are awesome.
I imagine it probably makes more sense for you to import most things from the west coast of the US, but just out of interest I checked
www.themaltmiller.co.uk and DHL for a pack of liquid yeast and 5 Brewlab slopes (<500g???) to the UK Tokyo embassy works out at £36.41 (US$49, JPY7,200) delivery for a total of £77.17 (US$104, JPY15,300) - which feels like it could be a lot worse, considering? They are the main retailer for Brewlab slopes and also get vault strains on request when available (most of the ones you mention are hard to get here too!), I think White Labs are maybe learning to not do too many vault strains in summer/winter, at the moment yeastman.com only shows WLP009, WLP064 and WLP515 in production, there's usually a few more than that.
![Craft A Brew - Safale S-04 Dry Yeast - Fermentis - English Ale Dry Yeast - For English and American Ales and Hard Apple Ciders - Ingredients for Home Brewing - Beer Making Supplies - [1 Pack]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41fVGNh6JfL._SL500_.jpg)
