You’re talking about Omega? My club had Mark Schwarz give a talk last fall, really great presentation. One experiment they ran compared 3 or 4 yeasts propagated under similar conditions. At the end, they all had different cell counts but similar biomass suggesting that cell size/density varied. He mentioned some commercial brewers started doing cell counts for some of their strains and having low cell counts, despite getting very good results, and pointed to this as a culprit. I’m sure I’m butchering the explanation, but it encouraged me never to waste time with cell counts.
Back a few years, we had Lance Shaner present to our club at a brewery get together - like you say, very informative. Omega was new then and had limited strain availability; now they offer a pretty wide variety and have several innovative strains that seem quite popular. It is great to see their successes and as a homebrewer in the far west Chicagoland area, my LHBS gets its deliveries as fresh as can be - almost like living in the PNW or East Coast!
I do really like Omega especially for the Bayern strain. Wyeast released it as 2352 Munich Lager 2 but it was in limited release. Now they have 113 which is [supposedly] the same as White Labs 940 which also used to be a limited release strain but is now year-round. I can’t get anything from White Labs locally. None of the 4-5 LHBS in my area carry it, AFAIK. But the closest LHBS does carry Wyeast and also Omega so I am a fan of theirs for sure.
in the end, a better way to look at yeast propagation is trading carbohydrates for biomass. I know its repeated alot on here, but we really do (myself included) get hung up on numbers and not actual performance.
while not a lager strain, their Jovaru strain does not get the love it deserves. It’s a very versatile yeast that gets pigeonholed into being “farmhouse” when in fact it makes an amazing pale ale, IPA, cream ale etc.
Does it have any of the “Farmhouse” qualities? When I say that word I am referring to what I mentioned in the Belgian thread… barnyard, horseblanket, complex, phenolic, etc. I have had suggestions from people who tell me this or that strain is “neutral” so I order it and brew something with it and it’s far from neutral. So I don’t do that anymore. Instead I need to taste a commercial example or a homebrewed example so I can taste the character of the yeast myself.
For the most part, they all ready are packaging enough cells to pitch up to six U.S. gallons of 1.060 wort. There is huge difference between a liquid yeast of 1991 and a liquid yeast culture of 2021.
Johnny is more of a chord melody than single note player. Yngwie deserves credit for infusing classical music into hard rock. Granted Ritchie Blackmore and Uli Jon Roth preceded him, but they did not have the old school metal edge. The whole Shrapnel Records thing brought us slew of guitar shredders. One of guitarists that is still alive and well today is Richie Kotzen. He fused blue-eyed soul with neoclassical fusion. \
