Mixing american and german hefe yeast

[MedicineMan]

I was thinking about making a hefe and mixing white labs Bavarian and American hefe yeast. Any thoughts?

 

[smyrnaquince]

Why?

 

[MedicineMan]

I wanted to be able to mellow out the banana and clove, plus I like to experiment.

 

[william_shakes_beer]

If you do a little research you will find that a lot of the "different" strains of yeast are really just the same yeast packaged by a different manufacturer. You may be mixing what is essentially the same yeast. While I'm no expert, I suspect that if you take strain X, and expose it repeatedly to sugar composition Y, then harvest wash and repitch for many generations, you will get a yeast that is mutated to thrive in that sugar composition.

 

[AmandaK]

If you want to minimize the banana and clove, simply ferment it at a lower temperature. Try 60* and see what happens.

 

[AmandaK]

If you do a little research you will find that a lot of the "different" strains of yeast are really just the same yeast packaged by a different manufacturer. You may be mixing what is essentially the same yeast.

Are you saying that the German strains are the same as the American strains??

Also, Wyeast and White Labs may have the same source of their yeasts, but they are entirely different animals in practice. For example, WLP530 sucks (IMO) in comparison to Wyeast 3787. Wyeast 3068 is also a widely accepted better yeast than WLP300, even though the source is the same.

 

[helibrewer]

Never a good idea to mix yeast strains, you are better off fermenting them seperately then blending the finished beer.

Yeast strains are designed to compete, to prevent wild yeast from getting a foothold, so you will never know which yeast ends up dominating and which does little or nothing.

As additional info, wine yeast will kill off all beer yeast.

 

[TKOriginal]

I say try it. There are a lot of things that you are not supposed to do. Anyone can follow a beer kit, HB gets fun when you go off on your own. Amanda K does have a good point, try fermenting at a lower level.

 

[sweetcell]

it's all saccharomyces cerevisiae, so you'll be fine.

there is no guarantee that each will provide 50% of the flavor. one strain could out-compete the other. if one yeast has a long lag, by the time it gets going the other could have a huge head-start in the reproduction dept. if the bavarian gains the upper hand then you might still end up with more bananas and cloves (but less than if you went with bavarian only, obviously).

sounds like a fun experiment, let us know how it turns out!

 

[lpdjshaw]

Yeah you can mix 'em but as a couple people have stated previously you'll have better luck mellowing those banana/clove aromas by either fermenting the German/Bavarian at lower temps or just use the American strain on it's own. JMTC

 

[helibrewer]

it's all saccharomyces cerevisiae, so you'll be fine

So is Bread Yeast. My point was that you might as well do something predictable and repeatable in case you are happy with the result. Mixing yeasts during fermentation is unpredictable, your results will vary with every fermentation. Fermenting seperately, then blending the beer by bench trial gives you something much more consistent and repeatable.

there is no guarantee that each will provide 50% of the flavor. one strain could out-compete the other. if one yeast has a long lag, by the time it gets going the other could have a huge head-start in the reproduction dept. if the bavarian gains the upper hand then you might still end up with more bananas and cloves (but less than if you went with bavarian only, obviously).

sounds like a fun experiment, let us know how it turns out