Brewers yeast

From Beeripedia the Beer Wiki

Beer

Beer brewers classify yeasts as top-fermenting and bottom-fermenting. This distinction was introduced by the Dane Emil Christian Hansen. Top-fermenting yeasts are so-called because they form a foam at the top of the wort during fermentation. They can produce higher alcohol concentrations and prefer higher temperatures, producing fruitier ale-type beers. An example of a top-fermenting yeast is Saccharomyces cerevisiae, known to brewers as ale yeast. Bottom-fermenting yeasts are used to produce lager-type beers. These yeasts ferment more sugars, leaving a crisper taste, and grow well at low temperatures. An example of a bottom-fermenting yeast is Saccharomyces pastorianus.

For both types, yeast is fully distributed through the beer while it is fermenting, and both equally flocculate (clump together and precipitate to the bottom of the vessel) when it is finished. By no means do all top-fermenting yeasts demonstrate this behaviour, but it features strongly in many English ale yeasts which may also exhibit chain forming (the failure of budded cells to break from the mother cell) which is technically different from true flocculation.

Lambic, a style of Belgian beer, is fermented spontaneously by wild yeasts primarily of the genus Brettanomyces.

In industrial brewing, to ensure purity of strain, a 'clean' sample of the yeast is stored refrigerated in a laboratory. After a certain number of fermentation cycles, a full scale propagation is produced from this laboratory sample. Typically, it is grown up in about three or four stages using sterile brewing wort and oxygen.

This page uses content from the English-language version of Wikipedia. The original article was at Yeast. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. The text of Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.