Dexter Stevens

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.

NA and LA beer has made huge strides in quality and availability in recent years, but large hurdles remain for creating it safely. Are you set up to manage risk and create tasty beer without alcohol?

NA beer has made huge strides in quality and availability in recent years, but large hurdles remain for creating it safely. Are you set up to manage risk and create tasty beer without alcohol?

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.

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!

There’s so much space for activities.

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.

There’s more than one way to get lactic acidity in beer. Let’s get brighter about Lactobacillus.

Theme words fill the board entirely and do not overlap.

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.

Understanding when and why to mix it up.

A more perfect system never existed for testing haze and flavor, thanks to the discovery of yeast’s hazy gene. In two brews differing only by the presence or absence of yeast-determined haze, blind tasters couldn’t pinpoint which was which. That begs the question, does haze contribute to flavor?

Since healthy yeast’s role in stable haze formation is a new concept, a lot of mysterious haze outcomes experienced by brewers can be helped via understanding yeast.