After a few days, here’s where we are:

For the ales: the first batch - the one with the London Ale yeast - went from 1.045 to 1.013 and is done, sitting at 4.2% I’ve had a few glasses of it straight from the fermenter (no carbonation) and I like it… yes, some carbonation would work well for it, but even as-is, it’s a nice, easy drink.

The second batch - using English Ale yeast - went from 1.054 and is reading 1.017 at the moment, and might drop some more, yet. Even so, it’s 4.9%…so the yeast might have had a difference but I’d wonder if it wasn’t steeping without a cheesecloth versus with, for the above. The right answer is to redo the whole thing again, except 100% the same, side by side, changing only the steeping method… Either that or change only the yeast…

We’re still waiting for fermentation to kick off appreciably on the meads; those were 100% identical save for the barm from each ale.

Another experiment done as part of this was bread. I used a modern no-knead bread recipe which usually results in 4 loaves of great bread.

This time, I made the recipe except that I combined the dry ingredients (flour, salt) into three equal amounts. I divided the water in thirds, too, then added three different yeasts with the water into the dry ingredients.

  • One third got regular (bread) yeast as a control.
  • One third got yeast via harvesting barm from the ale which used the London Ale yeast (the first ale brewed, since it was further along).
  • One third got yeast harvested from the lees of a stout I had made previously.

The harvested barm was what we had also used for the meads. The third portion of yeast was a “washed” yeast where you reserve trub from a beer fermentation and “wash” it a number of times (adding water and letting things settle out, with the intent of slowly winding up with 3 layers in a vessel: trub on the bottom, a bright white yeast layer and clear water on top).

This method looks a bit nicer than what I’ve been doing, so I might follow this next time for washing yeast.

As far as using the barm for yeast for subsequent use, we’ll see how the meads turn out… I thought the bread would’ve been a good test, too, buuuut, going back to the bread…

All three loaves failed.

I don’t know why, but since it was all three that failed, I won’t blame the yeast differences. Maybe they weren’t allowed to proof long enough - they were all rather dense - or maybe it’s because I added too much spent grains 1:1 in place of AP flour.

That…might’ve been it. But the weird thing was, even though all 3 were clearly 1/3 of the whole recipe, just divided (versus doing 3 separate recipes from scratch), I know the weights were all the same. The dry ingredients all weighed the same. The same amount of water was added. Only the yeast was different.

…and all 3 loaves were different up front, not just after baking. None rose sufficiently and 2 of the 3 (the 2 ale yeast loaves) were much more wet to begin with. Which…made no sense, as again, all ingredients were the same at that point.

Oh well. Twist my arm, have me brew more and do more bread experiments :D

The ales are good and here’s hoping the same is true for the meads…