BourbonEnthusiast.com

John,

You're still too domestic, girl

Whoohoo! Speaking of domestic, I've been meaning to drop you a note about the rabbit recipe you sent me for Easter. And you say y'all have venison for Christmas? I laughed my ass off. Actually, that recipe looked pretty good and I intend to try it. I'm just wondering what your Halloween dinner might consist of...

And about those glasses...not picking them up after the party is no problem at all (I'm lazy as hell... ). There's just never anything to dump out. None of my friends ever leave anything in their glasses. They consider that alcohol abuse...so I'll just be sniffing dry glass...

I am going to try to capture some wild yeast this summer. I am going to use the method found in the Taylor Diary and see what happens. I am hoping that a wild yeast will yield an alcohol that is whiskey quality.

The one concern I have is the fact that there are so many old distilleries within 5 miles of my home. I wonder if their yeast strains have become the dominating strains in the area. It would make sense for facotries who use vats of several thousand gallons to raise yeast for most of the year, to have that yeast become the dominant yeast in the local area. It is not like they did anything to keep the yeast from escaping into the wild. The fermenters were open topped in most cases and yeast spores are airbourne spores.

If I could chime in on this with my limited knowledge. I took a Hard Hat Tour at BT and noticed several mylar bags of yeast sitting ready to be added into a vat somewhere. I also toured the Barton Distillery and noticed the same thing. Several mylar bags of yeast.

In all of the tours I've taken at Four Roses, which are many, I haven't noticed any big silver bags of yeast. Now, Four Roses may use them but I haven't seen them around. Which makes me think that they use some other process besides pre-packaged yeast. This is an assumtion and I could be very wrong.

Now I have a question. Do all distilleries use "propietary" pre-packaged yeast? (I tend to think in the affimative)

I would assume that pre-packaged yeast could mitigate the contamination problem until it became live in the mash.

Apparently Buffalo Trace and Barton does, or at least I'm assuming they do since the yeast packages (5lb to 10lb bags) were plentiful at both places.

I do every now and again bake bread and I naturally start to think upon seeing the bags of yeast how it would make my bread taste using their "propietary yeast". I did ask at Buffalo Trace but was turned down. No big surprise. I also ask at Four Roses, who has been the recipient of many of my baking adventures during their Mellow Moments events, and also was turned down because of the "propietary" nature of the Beast/Yeast. It was also stated at Four Roses that the only yeast they have is liquid. Interesting!

I still tend to think that with ten different yeast strains they probably are using pre-packaged dried live cultures instead of carting around ten different jugs of live liquid yeast like the folkes at Jim Beam are still doing


Thanks for listening/reading

ChuckMick

Four Roses uses five different yeasts, all proprietary and developed by Seagrams, which had a portfolio of something like 300 propietary strains.

The big yeast companies sell a generic "whiskey yeast," which some of the distilleries use.

When Heaven Hill acquired Bernheim, they were forced to switch to dry yeast, as Bernheim doesn't have the facilities for making jug yeast and it would have cost millions of dollars to add them. Parker and Craig started out using the generic "whiskey yeast" Diageo had been using there, but they didn't like it, so they took their yeast and had the company make a dry version of it.

It's an open secret that Beam and Heaven Hill use the same yeast strain, but Heaven Hill now uses it in dry form while Beam continues to use jug yeast. Brown-Forman uses jug yeast at both of its Kentucky distilleries. I'm not sure about Jack Daniel's. Barton uses dry, as does Buffalo Trace. Wild Turkey uses jug. So does Maker's.

Chuck,
You and I (along with just about anyone with a brain) know that it wouldn't really cost "millions of dollars to add" a freakin' dona tank to produce whatever yeast Parker and Craig would like to use. There's no such animal as a "dry" version of the Beams' HH yeast; I suggest that they just simply stopped using it on accounta Red Star is lots cheaper and they believe (perhaps erroneously -- we'll see in a few years, after they both retire) that their customers won't know the difference.

Jeff,
An astute observation, as usual.
My guess is that the similarity you noted is a bit less subtle than simply what yeast was being used in the fermentation.
I'm sure you know what I mean.

cowdery wrote:...It's an open secret that Beam and Heaven Hill use the same yeast strain,...

I blame Earl: http://www.heaven-hill.com/aboutheavenhill.shtml
I think: bubble gum!

Here is an interesting thought - there is really only one example of wheated bourbon because all of the wheated bourbons use the same yeast strain. Maker's Mark received their yeast strain from Stitzel-Weller and the that is the same yeast strain UD was using when they sold the brands. I ssume that the the two companies purchasing the wheated bourbons kept the same yeast strain in their current production because the flavor profile has not radically changed.

Now think about this - a wheated bourbon with Four Roses' fruity yeast. Or wheated bourbon with Wild Turkey's robust and full flavored yeast. These would be interesting experimental bourbons. It would be interesting to see if wheat holds up with other yeast strains. It would be interesting to see how much the flavor that everyone raves about in wheated bourbon is in the yeast.

Stitzel-Weller had their yeast produced as a dry yeast the last 2 decades of operation and I assume that BT is simply using the old Stitzel-Weller dry yeast for their Weller Brands. I am pretty sure Julian would insist upon it for his whiskey. I assume Heaven Hill is also using it at Bernheim.

Under the Van Winkles, Stitzel-Weller used a jug yeast with hops in the dona. After the Van Winkles sold the distillery cut costs by going to a dry yeast. They had their yeast mass produced and dried.

I revived this thread because I like the title and wanted to write a few words about yeast, specifically the yeast used at Heaven Hill's Bernheim distillery.

As Craig Beam explained it to me, when Heaven Hill bought Bernheim they were forced to use dry yeast, since the company wouldn't spring for a yeast room. Initially they used the dry yeast United had been using, which Craig referred to as Schenley yeast. They tried Red Star's standard whiskey yeast and didn't like that either so they asked Red Star to produce a dry version of Heaven Hill's yeast. It took a lot of trial and error, but that's what they were eventually able to do.

The yeast experiments ran from April 1999 (when HH took over) through that fall. It’s a single culture sweet yeast and comes in vacuum-sealed bags that have to be refrigerated.

When Craig decided he wanted to learn to be a distiller, it was his grandfather, Earl, who saw to his education. The first thing he learned to do was make yeast. That wasn't a random choice. Earl felt that was the first skill a future distiller needed to have. Eddy Russell, too, has told me that Jimmy told him if you control the yeast, you control everything.

Craig learned that making jug yeast is a three-day process. On Tuesday you cleaned everything up and got everything ready. He learned how to crack the malt using a coffee grinder. Then they would drive over to the spring head in a pickup truck and fill four or five big cans with water taken directly from the spring.

On Wednesday, they put on their white aprons and boiled hops for the yeast mash, They wore masks to protect against malt dust, then slowly added the malt, using a mixer to combine everything. "There is an art to it," said Craig.

They would get it mixed up good, cover it with a hops sack and let it sit for three hours, then add the yeast. Then they would cover it again and Earl would lay an monkey wrench on top to make sure nobody messed with it.

When they came in onThursday. if it had run over onto the floor, that was a good sign. The worst part of the job was the clean-up, as there would be sticky malt syrup everywhere.

I read this thread tonight and found it very interesting even though it got off track a couple of times. My question is out of curiosity how did they used to go about catching/domesticating a wild yeast strain?

Booker Noe explained this to me many years ago, in telling the story about how Jim Beam developed the yeast that is still used at Beam. Shortly after Repeal, Jim mixed up a yeast mash using his own particular recipe, in a bucket, and placed it on the screened back porch of his house in Bardstown. When it started to work he would watch it and smell it. If he didn't like the way it looked or smelled he would dump it out and start over. He kept doing that until he got something he liked.

His wife complained that it stunk up the whole house.

Earl Beam, who was the third master distiller at Heaven Hill, was Park Beam's son and Carl Beam's brother. Park was Jim Beam's brother. Although Earl was the older brother, Carl (nickname Shucks) was made master distiller at Beam, so Earl left and became master distiller at Heaven Hill, and took the Beam yeast with him.

You probably won't get anyone at either place to confirm on the record that they use the same yeast, but they won't categorically deny it either. It has been confirmed to me privately by people in a position to know.

As for making yeast from scratch, I asked Craig if he thought anyone could do it today. He thought about it for a long time and answered, "maybe."

I know that yeast is considered a critical contribution to flavor and it certainly is in beer-making (beverage beer), yet Heaven Hill bourbon is not really similar to Beam's. Also,the Beam taste, judging by tastings of their products from the 1960's and 70's, seems to have evolved over the years. Of course there are other factors which play into flavor, and I am sure distillery labs have studied this down to a fine science. Sometimes I wonder if it is not so much what a yeast puts into the drink as what it doesn't.

Gary

You'd have to have a very skilled lab technician to harvest your own wild yeast strain, but it can most certainly be done. The first step is to put out "bait" in the manner that Mr. Noe described. You'd then need to take that fermentation to your lab, and isolate the yeast from the rest of the garbage. You could then prepare a slant, and keep it frozen until needed. The brewing yeast labs like White Labs would beef up their libraries by buying bottles of bottle conditioned British ales, look for a healthy yeast cell, and then put it on a slant.

Dry yeast has come a loooong way in the last decade. You can get dozens of ale strains that you couldn't get previously. Some very characterful strains are now available, so you aren't stuck using neutral, boring strains. Dry yeast also opens the door for the use of multiple strains, which can really yields some unique results. You can also use your main liquid strain, and either add the dry yeast in the same fermenter, or add dry yeast in one fermentation and distill it off, and blend it with distillate made from your main liquid strain. And then there's the lager and wine strains out there, which can (and have ) been used to create unusual spirits.

I share Mr. Cowdery's surprise at the lack of yeast handling knowledge among many (but certainly not all) of the new US microdistillers. There's almost zero discussion of yeast strains, which I find really odd.....and as Mr. Cowdery's post above alludes, if you control the yeast, you control everything. Many seem to view yeast and yeast handling as an afterthought, when it is really one of the very best tools for creating truly unique spirits.

And, of course, many of them have never used yeast before, and never will. Which is a shame, IMHO. It's half the fun.

Greg Davis, Master Distiller at Tom Moore, is the only large distillery American master distiller with a brewing background. He put it well in saying that all of the flavor that will be in the distillate is created during fermentation, i.e., it's created by the yeast. The still doesn't create any flavors, it just concentrates them.

Hence my constant reminder to micro-distillers that "distiller" and "still operator" are not the same thing.

Who uses jug yeast and who uses dry? Here's my list.

Jug:
Jim Beam
Maker's Mark
Woodford Reserve
Brown-Forman
Jack Daniel's
Wild Turkey

Dry:
Tom Moore
Heaven Hill
Buffalo Trace

Not sure:
George Dickel
Four Roses