Danielle Sommer

Flavors are way more powerful than most people think. And some more than others. There’s a reason terms of endearment center on sweet things. Sweet things innately make us happy. Even as we age, and value flavor complexity perhaps most of all, it turns out that sweetness still has an outsized function. Not sweetness for sweetnesses sake, perhaps, but it does allow us to take in more flavor information overall, synergistically. ​“A spoonful of sugar…” indeed.

Though phenolic character and diastatic ability frequently appear together in brewing strains, they are not really connected at a genetic level. Take a look at which strains are just phenolic, which are phenolic and diastatic, and which are just diastatic. You might be surprised.

Here are two real life examples of tricky results from diastatic yeast contamination testing that threw brewers for a loop. One was a pretty expensive lesson. If you read it here, maybe it will never happen to you.

What I do have is a very particular set of skills…

Get a better grip on diastatic yeast to improve your protection from a potentially devastating cross-contamination.

Media that gives a snapshot of actual diastatic activity covers gaps in current testing and adds more insight to diastatic cross-contamination screening. This is something new from Omega Yeast researchers.

Omega Yeast’s researchers tweaked standard LCSM so it alerts to the strains it had previously been missing. Just take a look at how standard LCSM and the optimized version perform differently. Scary!

A brewing-themed crossword puzzle

This improved recipe for LCSM, developed by Omega Yeast’s researchers, covers gaps you may not have been aware existed with standard commercial LCSM.

Omega Yeast’s R&D team gives phenolic strains’ fruity esters a tap take-over, making former Belgian and Hefeweizen strains into something clean and fruity, and a new tool for more modern styles.

Gram staining and catalase testing are lab tools that when considered together help you assess what threat a contaminant might pose. It’s not what each test tests for that’s the point really, it’s more about identifying characteristics that differentiate groups of bacteria, so you know what you’re likely to be dealing with.

When yeast leaves some of its discarded things around, it tends to pick up after itself (well, with a little encouragement). Then again, sometimes it just has too much on its plate. That’s where ALDC comes in. ALDC is like the Marie Kondo of diacetyl. It gets rid of what will later become a mess before it even starts. And it can be even more effective when yeast are enabled to produce it.

One especially sweet, thick IPA style and one extremely dry, thin one may have something good together when they combine signature elements.

You might be someone who avoids a bloated pack, but once it’s discounted, maybe it starts to look pretty good. Should you go for it? Why are some of us even suspicious of a swollen pack in the first place?

Incisive new strains can deliver something novel, or they can make something that already exists even better. In this series of articles, we look at modern strains through the lens of ​‘new’ or ​‘improved,’ deliver helpful takes on some yeast fundamentals (like esters, attenuation, and more), and finish with some juicy research: a new technology giving greater command of clarity and haze. Top Crop’s annual newsprint edition is available online or in print.

In a recent writeup for the Colorado Brewers Guild, Laura discusses how the R&D team began researching haze and how this research identified successful approaches to building long-lasting, stable haze.

Yeast-derived haze can be substantial. How much has a lot to do with interaction with dry hopping. Here, see the surprising clarifying effect of an early-fermentation dry hop in a double dry hop scenario.

Omega Yeast can remove yeast-determined haze potential from a haze-positive strain at the gene level. Check out how Cincinnati’s Rhinegeist Brewery and Omega Yeast partnered to present experimental info on this topic for the 2024 Ohio Guild Craft Brewers Conference.

Can you guess which words are connected and what they have in common? Make four groups of four and name their relationship.

If you’re interested in brightness, it’s useful to know how a very low-haze-producing yeast strain can be made to produce even less.