Note: this is a repost of Northern Brewer chiming in on a substitute for London III to use with Boddingtons. I don't know how to link to the exact post but it is part way down this page
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/forum/...r-london-ale-iii-aka-boddintons-yeast.654324/
Ah, the quest for the One True Boddies Yeast. It's kinda like the quest for Eldorado, only less achievable.
If you're serious about getting the right yeast, then there's only one realistic option for homebrewers and that's to drop an email to Brewlab saying what beer you're trying to clone, and asking them what they would recommend. In many cases they can't actually say "this is the yeast from X brewery", but they can say "We suggest this yeast if you're trying to clone a beer from X brewery". Subtle difference.
What do we know for certain?
Whitbread bought Boddies in 1989, so they would have had access to all Whitbread's resources, including their huge yeast bank, after that time.
The original Boddingtons brewery was in Manchester, 170 miles as the crow flies from London, or over 200 miles by road. So this idea that London Ale III is somehow "the" Boddies yeast just makes no sense at all. I've seen theories that maybe 1318 was a London yeast stored by the Boddies/Whitbread yeast bank but not actually used by them, or that they lost their original yeast and replaced it with a yeast from Courage (of London).
Ron Pattinson has
blogged extensively on Boddies, which means we have a load of attenuations for the bitter, which had more or less the same recipe for a century - close to a pale malt/Goldings SMaSH, with maybe 7-10% sugar - so we can get an idea of what kind of yeast they were using :
1901 74.7%
1939 76.7%
1939 77.8%
1951 87.5%
1966 89.6%
1971 91.6%
1974 88.4%
1987 83.6%
We're not looking at your typical southern English sickly-sweet beer - this is classic Northern bitter, dry and hoppy. So forget Windsor and WLP002, they're way off-beam.
One can speculate on the reasons for the increase in attenuation. Some of it will undoubtedly be improving technology on the ingredient side, and there were minor tweaks to the recipe. In 1939 they were using 17-20% maize, which got killed off by WWII, in the 1970s sugar crept up to 13%, in 1987 they'd dropped adjuncts altogether.
The leap in attenuation in WWII is intriguing, and makes me wonder if they either deliberately or accidentally got some diastaticus in there which would allow them to make the same amount of beer from fewer ingredients during wartime.
Anecdotally, Boddies seems to have been notably bitter in the 1970s, but the quality dropped significantly in the recession of the early 1980s - probably sometime in late 1981. There are also rumours that they lost their yeast at some point, which might support the theory that they got yeast from Courage.
But those 90% attenuations look like a diastaticus yeast, which in British terms makes me think of the saison relatives normally found in Yorkshire squares. Indeed WLP038 Manchester is one such yeast, although I don't think we know what brewery it comes from and the official attenuation isn't that great.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, I'd use either Notty or 1469.
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