The real issue for me is finding a way to make our garage work - some kind of fermentation chamber - or having to grab my son to help haul the heavy vessel with 12ish gallons in it
Sounds like if he's not around then you either have a shorter brewlength - or cool it, then pitch and transfer to smaller vessels to move it and count the transfer as your first rouse?
if keeping the beer in the aerobic growth phase was the consideration, all they'd have to do is goose it with pure O2 in a sustained flow.
I loathe the Ringwood strain and have never produced anything I'd call palatable with it (or what is presented as Ringwood when I buy it).
Don't forget these practices date back to before you could just ring up and order pure O2, and now they're Traditional (and not followed by more "progressive" breweries...)
AIUI Wyeast 1187/WLP005 is just the high-floccing half of the Ringwood yeast, so in its defence you could be seeing only part of the story, it was presumably selected for ease of dropping more than taste. I'm out of area for the brewery so I've not had much of their beer, but I've been rather underwhelmed by what I have had in cask, and though they're common enough in supermarkets I always seem to find something more interesting instead... I've seen it suggested by random-people-on-the-internet that a) Conan is
NCYC 1188 and thus b) it's the other half of Wyeast 1187. I've not seen anything solid to support those assertions, but Conan does feel like the high-attenuating half of a northern English double strain, so it's possible. Obviously there's the usual problem of NCYC secrecy - all we know is that NCYC 1188 is an ale strain deposited by a British brewery in 1960 - but I'd love to see some sequence data and family trees.
The brewery is cobbled together, the hot side was taken from Hartley's of Ulverston when it was closed by Robinson's, the fermenters from Thorne when it was closed by Vaux.
Per
http://www.ibdlearningzone.org.uk/article/show/pdf/822/ and
http://protzonbeer.co.uk/features/2...s-of-black-sheep-s-remarkable-brewing-success the first fermenters came from Hardy & Hanson's, they expanded with some from Darley's of Thorne - three of each AIUI, but it explains why they use Hardy's yeast, they got it as a "package". The Robbies connection continued, they bottled Black Sheep for a long time, not sure if that's still true.
@G you might enjoy both those articles, Protz has grist and hops for most of their beers, and mentions rousing every six hours. It's possible that Roger is getting his 3 hours and 6 minutes confused, practices have changed over time, or they rouse Riggwelter more often than the weaker beers. The 2007 IBD article is more interested in kit, but you get to the good stuff once you get past the details of their then new casking line. They stop rousing after 60-72 hours, when 3-4 points above racking gravity, which in turn will be a couple of points above FG. They go into nitty-gritty detail like EBC's and which hop farms they use, I hadn't realised that Fawcett's are a shareholder. I like the quote from Jonathan Virden, the Guinness brewer "There are two ways of selling beer – marketing and hops! Marketing is expensive, hops are cheap!" There's closeups of the squares on the final page.
The HH I acquired - this is Hardy and Hanson, the same as yours, or Black Sheep (I'm not clear if you're saying Black Sheep's originated with HH and has morphed due to a different practice, or is actually an entirely different provenance - sorry, I'm not well versed in this)?
I read it as the former - given that yeast is evolving through every generation, you have to be quite precise about the point at which it was stashed by NCYC/Brewlab etc. Evolution is most obvious in the Conan family where the sudden popularity of NEIPAs has led to it finding itself in a whole load of different breweries overnight, and people seem to be finding that "Conan" from different commercial suppliers differ significantly in the FV.
An American guy on jims recently bought the Harvey's strain. He said it cost him a total of $21.39. $8 for the yeast and $13 for the shipping. I dont know if this works out the same as £15.90
At current exchange rates £15.90 is US$21.42, so sounds about right. Harvey's is another northern strain that's found its way south, it came from John Smith's.
The Brakspear strain was the first strain I cultured from a bottle of Triple. It stunk the apartment out with sulpher. Mrs MyQul was not impressed.
Sadly the triple is currently discontinued in bottles. I remember it being a tasty beer
If you've got sulphur, you've probably got a conditioning yeast rather than the pitching yeast. Certainly other parts of the Marstons empire use conditioning yeast. The old Brakspear yeast originated at Mann - my guess is that it was the strain that Simpsons of Baldock bought from Mann in the 1930s and then distributed widely around the SE. But they lost it during all their corporate turmoil of the 90s/noughties, I assume the new one came from Marstons. So who knows what WLP023 and 1275 are - the fact that White Labs call the former "Burton Ale" rather suggests it came from Marstons.
[heh, the new multiquote system is quite cute once you get the hang of it!]
