"House Strain" ?

[AWKBrewing13]

I had a question about house strain yeast. I am assuming this is a yeast used by breweries that is used is most but not all of their beers like Bells Brewery in MI. They have their unique yeast and then have a couple other ones for there specialty beers?

The actual question is what is a good "House strain" to use for homebrewers. Typically I brew American and English ales. IPA's, english bitters (ordinary and extra), Oatmeal stouts, Porters, Rye Pale ales, etc. Nothing completely off the charts and i try to stay close to traditional in style.

Should I use just 2 yeasts then? One for american and one for English?
Is there one that will do both?

 

[Flipadelphia]

I know 3 Floyds uses Wyeast 1968 as their house strain, and I absolutely love that yeast. It's great for just about anything.

 

[kcmobrewer]

I experiment with lots of different yeasts, I personally don't see the point in sticking with just one. With multiple yeasts, which most breweries can't afford or don't have the space to do, you can create all kinds of cool beers that don't even exist. I've done IPAs with all kinds of weird yeasts that I've never seen them done with before. Some came out better than others but it was fun trying them.

Just my 2 cents.

 

[Terek]

once yeast has been used and reused over and over again, it mutates itself to cope with the general conditions in its use, i.e. ferm temps, vessels, styles, times, etc, etc. It then becomes a "house strain" A yeast unlike all others, but still has most of the characteristics of the origional.

I personally have 2 "house strains", a us-05 (american) and us-04 (english). Each have been washed and reused by me for over a year now. I sometimes use 1469 for things like an oak imperial stout, and i keep it washed as well, but it has only been washed 3 times. But i mainly use the 05 and 04, which have been washed 20-30 times ea. I did a split batch after boil recently and pitched my house us-05 in one, and a brand new pack of us-05 in the other. The flavors were deffinetly different. Both I liked very much, but i did prefer the one with my "house yeast." This easily could just be a mental trick my mind did to justify all my labor, but i like it better. A truer statement is I have saved over $120 by reusing that one pack of yeast i bought all that time ago. Basically making my batches cost 13 cents for yeast ea. and that number gets smaller every time i re pitch it.

 

[Falcon3]

White Labs 007 or Wyeast 1098 (equivalent)- English yeasts that attenuate fairly low and dry. If you've got temp control, you can bring the temp up and underpitch to get an "English" character to it, or lower the temp and pitch a lot of yeast for a drier "american" character.

 

[jnacey]

I use WLP090 (Super San Diego) for my american style beers that I want to dry out. I use Wyeast 1028 (London Ale) for beers that can be a bit fuller with a little "frutiness". I use these two for around 90% of my beers. The others tend to be belgians that I buy specific yeast for that beer or imperials where I usually use Scottish 1728.

Really, though, the beauty of homebrewing is the ability to cheaply try different yeast strains so play around with it.

 

[Terek]

I apologize for not really answering your real question. I really like us-05. Its common, cheep, lasts forever in the fridge and works well with any beer style. It ferments quickly and i consistantly get FG's of 1.012 on any gravity of beer. I also use it in ciders and apfelwines and it works great. I usually get a FG of 0.998 in ciders

 

[jalmeida]

Heck, you could even see what wild yeast you have floating around. Open wild ferment a small batch of something and see what you get. The Sally's will cringe at that and tell you to never do that, but what fun is it if you can't experiment and learn?

One thing to also keep in mind is the more times you re-use a yeast to more it will mutate. That is how we have so many different types now is the mutation of another strain.


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