Whats your favorite IPA yeast?

[couchsending]

I'm curious that nobody here has mention the yeast harvested from Bell's Oberon or THA. Do we even know what it is? I'm playing around with it right now in several styles.

You can buy it from The yeast bay.

 

[Northern_Brewer]

I'm curious that nobody here has mention the yeast harvested from Bell's Oberon or THA. Do we even know what it is? I'm playing around with it right now in several styles.

As has been mentioned, Yeast Bay appear to be selling the Bell's yeast as Midwestern Ale (but it would be cheaper to just harvest it from a Bell's bottle, supposedly Oberon is the beer they use to multiply the yeast in the brewery). I've never had their beer, and not used the yeast, but given the history and what I've read my guess would be that they took one of the Ballantine yeasts (BRY-96 or BRY-97) and it's evolved at the brewery. People seem to think it's not quite as clean as Chico but drops better, which sounds more like a descendant of BRY-97/1272 - perhaps @Biobrewer has done some fingerprinting of his Midwestern yeast, even if he obviously can't comment on Bell's.

Here's one review of it versus Conan : https://processbrewing.wordpress.com/2015/12/18/yeast-comparison-conan-vs-bells-yeast-bay/

But I'd argue with the basic premise of this thread - are we talking West Coast IPA, NEIPA, historical British IPA or Belgian IPA? Only one of those would have a clean Chico-type yeast as the "best" yeast for the style.

[Actually I don't really agree with the whole concept of Belgian IPAs with POF+ yeast, but a useful cheat if you're ever asked to make one is to use WLP515 Antwerp or 3655 Schelde - or (I've not tried it) de Koninck bottle dregs - which have impeccably Belgian credentials but which are POF- and more Chico-like in character.]

Another question would be are you trying to maximise hop expression at all costs, or do you want a little biotransformation which will reduce the hop intensity but give you more complexity? Conan tends to leave hops untouched, 1318 will biotransform them somewhat. As does T-58 - you may not want to ferment 100% with a POF+ yeast like T-58, but it seems to be a bit of a thing for the coolest kids on the NEIPA scene to use S-04 with 5-10% T-58 for a hint of spice and hop complexity.

I'm in the middle of a load of yeast trials, which will probably take years to complete but for less common yeasts, I'd give a shout out for WLP041 which I enjoyed in the one beer I've made with it - although connected to Redhook it's a relative of WLP002. Still waiting for someone to try Mangrove Jack M15 or Brewlab F40 in a NEIPA though...