On Mon, Jun 13, 2005 at 02:22:31PM -0500, Thomas Eibner wrote:
> I group all dry yeasts together in the category bakers yeast!
> *ducks and runs for cover*
You should never do that! You can't bake a decent bagel with a
bottom-fermenting yeast! Any bakers apprentice could tell you that!
Seriously, most baking yeast is a byproduct of spirit manufacture, so it
is probably optimised for a quick and effective fermentation, never mind
the taste, as that will be distilled away anyway. I have experimented
with it once, and got a decent but very uninteresting beer out of it.
In a way you are right, the more serious brewers tend to use liquid
yeasts. The dry ones do have their uses too. They are easy to handle,
even a beginner can get it right. They don't need to be smacked, rolled,
prepared, started, and cultivated in advance of brewing, and in reducing
infection risks, nothing is safer than dumping a pack directly in the
wort. Admittedly some of them are less interesting than the best of the
"wet" yeasts, but so what? Often you want the yeast to take a back seat,
and let other ingredients carry most of the weight.
The liquid yeasts really shine on the variety and selection, but it is
not always you need all that - most beers are made with one yeast
anyway. Only very experiencec brewers (Mr. Eibner for example) can know
the idiosyncracies of all the liquid ones. We mere mortals are often
better served by learning a few easy dry yeasts, and using them with the
full knowledge of their potential and their limits.
Fancy yeast or not,
it will be beer anyway
-H
--
Heikki Levanto "In Murphy We Turst" heikki (at) lsd (dot) dk
