This year’s annual Black Friday Brew is going to be a Cream Ale fermented with Denny’s Favorite 50 yeast left over from a brown ale I did 6 weeks ago. I’m not looking to stay within all the guidelines, but I thought it’d be interesting.
If it was me, I’d kick the corn up to a lb. The 1450 will make a great cream ale, although it may have a bit more mouthfeel than a cream ale traditionally does.
Many years ago, I purchased a yeast ranching kit from Brewtek. To go with, I bought some slants of yeast. One of them was called something like CA Brewpub yeast and labeled CL-50. I had just started developing test batches of my Rye IPA recipe and found that the CL-50 gave it a great mouthfeel while still having fermentation characteristics clean enough to let the other ingredients show through. I started talking it up online (usenet in those days!) and as the popularity of the Rye IPA recipe grew, more and more people wanted to try the yeast. The fact that you had to culture it from slants daunted a lot of people, though. Brewtek went out of business and sold their strains to another company, and that company to another company. Meanwhile, about 5 years ago, I started talking to Dave Logsdon of Wyeast about releasing it. He was hesitant to do so when another company was still selling it. Finally, that other company stopped selling it. I had fresh samples in our club yeast bank, so when Wyeast called about it we gave them a sample directly from the club bank. They cleaned it up and put it out as a VSS. It was so popular that they brought it out again as a VSS. It was so popular the 2nd time around that now it’s gonna be a full time strain starting in about Feb. They consulted me for a name for it and I gave them a lot of possibilities, NONE of which included my name! I was pushing for Noti Ale Yeast, but they decided it was gonna be Denny’s Favorite. I gotta tell ya, that as a homebrewer, it’s pretty damn cool to have a yeast named after you! I’m honored…
I’ll give it a try with some more corn. It’s instant grits, actually, and not flaked maize, if that matters. However, I’ll have to use 1.5 pounds to get to 25% and that pushes my gravity to 1.055, which is more than I want, so this will likely be a 4 gallon batch.
I’ve got CL-300 in my yeast bank along with many other of the original Brewtek strains. I’m trying to bank all of them. You can see my brewtek page here http://micrap.selfip.com:81/BrewtekYeastinfo.htm
