Yeah, like anyone made good beer in the 90s. People brewed mostly English ales then because with their flavor, no one could tell if the fermentation went wrong
Seriously though, the idea of proper pitching rate matters very little with Chico yeast in a 1.060 ale. Yeast IS like a bomb and will get the job done. However, when you’re going for 88% attenuation on a Trappist clone or want 10 gallons of a dry pilsner, a few points of attenuation or some unwanted esters is a big deal. These are the kind of beers that higher pitching rates have improved for many homebrewers. If you’re making 5 gallons of a pale ale or hefeweizen, just smack the pack.
Stan H. notes in his first BeerSmith podcast that the Trappists pitch “scary low” amounts of yeast. It seems that a healthy yeast is capable of transcending pitch rate, starter size, starter style, etc. This should be scalable at our level.
However, that information is a little oversimplified. There are many ways to control ester and higher alcohol production. For example, O2 can be used to control ester levels, even in high gravity wort1. I have already covered the reasons why higher pitching rates are needed in high gravity beers.
Close, it was 500ml Erlenmeyer flask. The recommended starter size was 300ml. Guess what? The approach worked very well.
By the way, then as now, the best selling home brewing yeast culture was BRY 96 (a.k.a. Ballantine “Beer,” “Chico,” Wyeast 1056, White Labs WLP001, Fermentis US-05, and BrewTek CL-10). Amateur brewing was not all English-style ale, Cascade, Centennial, Chinook, and Columbus bombs were pretty darn common back in the nineties. Recipes including English pale malt were nowhere near as common as recipes based on American 2-row combined with C60. Quality English hops were also much more difficult to acquire than the American cultivars, which is why the seeds for the beers that we are drinking today were laid in the nineties (some would say in 1975 with the introduction of Anchor Liberty Ale).
They’re also repitching yeast from a previous fermentation. Like Mark said, yeast is not going to perform optimally the first time in an actual fermentation. This is especially true of the Rochefort yeast in my experience.
I chuckle every time I read comments about brewing way back in the 90s. I remember a guy I worked with brought me a bomber of what he said was “Its a chocolate raspberry stout. Thats a German beer. Drink it warm” I chilled it. It was about as sweet as a milkshake, but grittier. I thought it was awesome. First real German beer I had ever tried. Edit: not counting Heineken
If you ever want a laugh, find the book “Home Brewing Without Failures” by H.E. Bravery. It was published in the 50s in England but made its way over here in the 60s. Read about 100% crystal malt recipes, 8 hour mashes, nettle wines, and more, with the bonus of a very opinionated British narrator.
Yes, I drank more than a few “interesting” beers back in the nineties (interesting is the only polite way to describe these beers), but I have to say that I have tasted way more infected beer in the last few years than I did in the nineties, and that includes professionally brewed beer. I am also encountering more of what Denny refers to as “WTF was the brewer thinking” beers. I judged a beer that was entered as a special bitter that tasted just like wintergreen flavored toothpaste.
People coming into the hobby today have no idea of how good they have it. I became a yeast geek out of necessity. Dry yeast was unusable for the most part, White Labs did not exist, and the Wyeast culture collection contained less than a dozen strains that might as well have been unobtainium on East Coast. I started plating and slanting yeast because that was the only way that I could obtain a reliable source of clean yeast for the first year or two.
All-grain brewing was another hurdle. Home brewing supply shops tended to be small because they were in retail areas or someone’s basement. For example, I started purchasing supplies from Maryland Homebrew (MDHB) when it was still being operated out of the basement of the owner’s previous residence. The only grain being sold by the shop at that time was specialty grain. The owner sold mostly kit beers that came in cans and canned extract (does anyone remember Bruce’s Dogbolter?). Things got a little better on the all-grain side when the owner quit his day gig and moved MDHB into commercial space. However, purchasing grain in bulk grain usually meant being part of a club purchase (my first big grain purchase was 220lbs as part of a BURP buy). It wasn’t until MDHB moved to the industrial park where it currently resides (they used to be a couple of doors down) that the grain situation really improved for me. Anyone visiting the shop today has no idea of how humble things were in the early days.
Along the lines of laughable 90s recipes I’d add most (or all) of the old Cat’s Meow recipe database. Tons of crystal malt, Cascade hops and ‘ale yeast’ in pretty much everything. Not coincidentally, every beer I brewed from there (not very many) tasted really similar.
Neat stories there, guys. I’ve got it pretty dang good. I started brewing in 2008 and feel very lucky to have had Midwest brewing supplies and Northern Brewer to choose from fairly locally. Even helping a friend brewing in 2005, it seemed somewhat mysterious to me. The Midwest tutorial video, going back and thinking about it, I’d say is quite outdated, even today. Weird how fast things change.
I never used that recipe database. Truth be told, I did not spend much time brewing other people’s recipes. I wanted to thoroughly understand the process. That type of knowledge can only come from not playing it safe.
With that said, I see the same kind of dynamic with hops today. Hops are being used to hide a host of poor brewing practices and sins. To the untrained palate, hops are like spices in that they can cover taint. With modern home brewing, the taint is mostly caused by low-level infection, which I believe can be traced back to the almost universal use of Star San coupled with “drive by” (a.k.a. “spray and go”) sanitization and poor yeast handling practices.
You all make it sound like the 90s was a loooong time ago and brewing was a wasteland.
I made some truly enjoyable beers back in the 90s. I’m still brewing one of the recipes I came up with back then.
Sure, there wasn’t the diversity of ingredients that we have today but you can make good beer with basic ingredients. You don’t need six different kinds of hops and 14 different grains.
I will acknowledge, though, that there were many beers and recipes (brewed by myself and others, including some pro breweries) that all tasted just about the same.
I disagree Mark. While hoppy beers are no doubt extremely popular today (arguably overly so), I doubt very seriously that large numbers of brewers are adding extra hops to beers they wouldn’t have otherwise, just to cover up infections. Hoppy beers are everywhere because that is the current consumer preference, like it or not.
I agree that customer preference drives the popularity of hoppy beers but not because the alternative is poorly brewed non-hoppy beer. I also agree with what I think underlies his point that if you stripped down the hops you would find a lot of beers both at home and on the commercial market that are loaded with brewing flaws. All one has to do is look at the number of breweries–often newer breweries–where people complain that all the beers are mediocre or worse except the IPA/IIPAs.
Yes, I see many modern home brewers covering up low-level infection produced off-flavors with high late hopping rates. This technique was not as prevalent in the nineties because late hopping rates were lower. The brewers with poor sanitation and yeast management practices stuck with stout and porter in the nineties.
That was not my intention. It was just merely a time when things that brewers who have entered the hobby in the last ten or so years take for granted were difficult to acquire or not available.
Me too!
Many of the beers made during that period tasted the same because we were making due with what we had available. The overuse of C60 was the result of being able to get any base malt that one wanted as long as it was American 2-row. :) The early nineties where worse than the late nineties in this regard.
I have a feeling it is our use of readily available 5L water bottles with their ridges and handle, as it took me very little effort to get the following when trying out your technique (it also gets rid of worrying about glass slipping out of the hands):
