Yeast

Many home vintners and home zymurgists don’t know about the single most important ingredient available for use in their home brews. I’m talking about liquid yeast. Liquid yeast is cultured in labs at all of the major labels. It is propagated from slants sometimes dating back to Pasteur himself. A slant is is simply a…

Home /Yeast An Introduction To Winemaking Yeast   Yeast – there seem to be so many varieties and strains; what’s an amateur winemaker to do? Well, for one, you could ignore all the different strains and stick with Lalvin EC1118 which apparently is pretty standard in most winemaking kits. Or, you can experiment! But where…

Second part of this. I’ve already mentioned the benefits of liquid yeast. If you tried one in your latest must, or better yet, did a comparison, chances are that I’m be preaching to the choir. However, liquid yeast is expensive compared to that little packet of dried yeast. Sometimes it’s hard to justify an 800%+…

According to the Lallemand website, DV10 yeast: “DV10 was selected by the SOEC in the Champagne region and is approved by the CIVC in Epernay. DV10 has strong fermentation kinetics over a wide temperature range and relatively low nitrogen demands. DV10 is famous for its ability to ferment under stressful conditions of low pH, high…

If you enjoy wine and other fermented beverages, be thankful for the existence of yeast. It is yeast, by consuming sugar, that produce the alcohol in the wine. Of course, yeast also produces carbon dioxide (CO2 which we don’t want too much of, generally speaking, in our wine. Sparkling wines are an exception to this.…

Some years ago, I was advised by a professional winemaker to use two different types of yeast when starting a blackcurrant wine. I’d never thought of trying this before, but I took the advice of the winemaker. The resulting wine was excellent! Some suggest that yeast have little to do with the flavours of a…

It’s happened a few times perhaps – you’ve got your juice ready to inoculate with yeast. You open the package of yeast and sprinkle it in a starter mixture, wait ten minutes and stir, and nothing happens. No foaming. Your yeast are not viable. How come? The most likely reason is how the yeast was…

Lalvin EC-1118 yeast is considered one of the best all round yeast strains. It is a wide temperature range that it can work within, and a high tolerance for alcohol – up to 18% by volume. With very compact lees, it makes for racking wine off the lees a much easier job. Due to its…