Home Brew Beer - How to Choose Your Yeast

One of the most important aspects to home brewed beer, or specifically, the process of home brewing beer and how to get it right is temperature. Your beer must ferment at the correct temperature for the particular yeast strain you are using. There is a working temperature range for each of the two major families of yeast. They are approximately set out below:Safales work between 17 degrees Celsius and 30 degrees Celsius (62.6 degrees to 86 degrees Fahrenheit)Saflagers work between 8 degrees and 25 degrees Celsius (46.4 degrees to 77 degrees Fahrenheit)When a yeast falls below that range it will hibernate. That is, it will go to sleep in the bottom of the fermenter. That's no great problem as lifting the temp and a gentle stir with a sterile paddle and it can be woken up again. However, when a yeast is taken to a temperature above that upper range limit, it dies.However, the problem with high temperatures in fermentation starts well below the temperature that kills yeast. What happens when a yeast works in a climate too warm is, it begins to create esters, these esters have a sweet taste, and once they are present in the wort you can not remove the taste. A home brewer should aim to ferment their wort in the lower half of the working temperature range. Diligence and action will be needed to avoid your wort getting too cold but the result is far better.Consider the climate your wort will ferment in, and take in to account that it will stay there fermenting for somewhere between 5 days and 2 weeks. In this time, it is bound to reach equilibrium with the ambient temperature if steps are not taken to control it. By taking into the account the area you are brewing in you can make an informed choice when deciding what you are going to brew. If its freezing cold, a Lager or a Pilsner, fermented with a Saflager yeast is probably going to be the best choice. It is possible to heat a brew up, so Ales, Draughts and Stouts brewed with a Safale are not out of the question.However, it is difficult to cool a warm wort down, especially when the ambient temperature is consistently high, and for this reason, use Saflager yeast should be saved for colder times of year or colder environments.In a commercial brewery, all kinds of machines are used to control the temperature of the fermentation so any beer can be made anywhere. Home brewers are limited by the climates they can create and we often have to live in the same environment as the one our beer ferments in, so unless you have an outside area you can brew in or you want to live in a house that is 7 degrees Celsius you might have a hard time brewing a lager. For this reason, it is important that a realistic view of what can be achieved at home is employed before each brew is laid down.

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