Being a homebrewer I don't like to waste my time brewing low ABV beers.
I wouldn't be saying that on this thread!
And one of the reasons to brew British-style beers yourself is to get them fresh if you can't get them locally, they can be so sensitive to ageing even in bottle - and of course it's almost impossible to replicate the One True Serve™ (cask) in export markets.
Bass used to be available in Montreal but now I have to brew it at home. I found a recipe published by the Brew your own magazine.
Just as a general comment I would use British sources for cloning British beers - there's plenty of them, and they're more likely to be based on the actual, fresh beer by someone with experience of what British beers are meant to taste like. That's not always the case for US authors....
Bear in mind that ABI have brewed Bass in the US since 2012 (ditto Beck's), so I guess that what you've seen is some change in the local distribution arrangements - or Montreal distributors shared British views on the US-brewed impostor.
Current cask brewed Bass is still surprisingly good too, it's made by Marstons currently and is probably about the best cask beer of theirs I've had.
Bit unfair - I don't know if it's dry-hopping or what, but beers like Pedigree need to be super-fresh as they get dull within hours of a cask being tapped. Get Pedigree at a high-throughput event like a festival or sports stadium and it can be cracking.
Many here have probably seen this many times but I’ll throw it out there to anybody new. Where this info comes from about which yeasts are supposedly from which brewery. If this is not in stickies someplace it should be.
http://www.mrmalty.com/yeast.htm
Although that's the usual list people quote in relation to yeast sources, it was demonstrably nonsense in some cases (particularly in relation to British strains) even before we had genome sequencing. Inevitably such lists have a lot of coulda-woulda-shoulda, but
dmtaylor's list is the least bad one we have, at least it's based on both DNA results and practical brewing experience.
I would describe the 1275 as very clean and more neutral with less character than most of the other English strains I’ve used....I would compare 1275 favorably to 1056 and just about say I could use them almost interchangeably.
Clean is just another word for bland - which is not what British yeast are about. You want the most characterful yeasts you can find, it's a vital part of the balance of British beer - and most commercial homebrew yeasts lack character compared to the ones actually used in British breweries.
WLP039 is available as a seasonal vault release now, I used it in some golden ales with good results. It is pretty clean, attenuated well, lets the hop flavor come through and drops clear quickly.
WLP039 is effectively a liquid version of Nottingham.
As an aside, Kristen England was the BJCP’s educational director for many years and is now brewing at Bent Brewstillery in Minnesota, he also has a PhD in pharmacology.
