you just pitch like normal yeast. Be advised, a lactic acid causing organism that is hop tolerant has the potential to be a hell of a contaminant in your brewery. Makes sure your cleaning and sanitizing regimen is on point.
According to the people who made it, it’s no more dangerous than any sacc yeast. I have no experience with it yet, so I’ll take their word for it until I do.
Searched the forum for this yeast and found this old thread. I recently brewed a batch with this and, now 8 days later, just sampled it. After writing down my sensory perceptions, I compared what I was tasting to the spec sheet. The recipe I used:
7.25 gal batch size
47% pale ale malt
28% wheat malt
9% vienna malt
16% light DME (added b/c I didn’t have enough pale or wheat malt on hand to hit my target OG)
No hops
Mashed @ 152 for 60 min
OG 1048, FG 1015
2 sachets yeast added to the bucket right before filling, no aeration
Fermented at a constant ambient temp of 68-70o, so the fermentation itself would have been on the high side of the recommended temp range.
I treated this the same as any other batch using dry yeast; a very straightforward pitch-and-ferment. Everything proceeded normally: normal lag time, normal-sized krausen, etc. I didn’t leave much headspace and I was a little concerned about that, but the size of the krausen was average. The only unusual thing I observed throughout the entire fermentation was the color of the krausen. It was whiter than a typical krausen.
The level of sourness is great. However, it is very one-dimensional. It doesn’t taste much different from simply adding straight lactic acid to a beer.
The red apple is very prominent. I don’t get any stone fruit, tropical fruit, or citrus. Just red apple.
There is a light but noticeable cinnamon-clove flavor to it. The spec sheet doesn’t indicate if this is POF + or -. According to the spec sheet, it grows on wild yeast media, which suggests POF+, but the radar graph shows no clove. But I’m definitely tasting light phenolics here. Other than the sourness, red apple, and cinnamon-clove, it’s very clean, no weird or atypical flavors.
I didn’t observe high attenuation, but I’m pretty sure that was a function of the DME, not the yeast.
Flocculation is as described, i.e. high. The beer is by no means crystal clear but it’s impressively clear at this point.
If you handed this to me and I didn’t know what it was, I’d guess it was a lightly spiced apple cider, albeit with less sourness. I honestly would have no clue this was a beer. I won’t be using this yeast again (I don’t like cider or apples even), but it was fun to experiment with an outside-the-box strain. I can see this strain appealing to brewers who like cider…but then why not just make a true cider.
Thanks for sharing your results. It’s good to get a point of reference on this. The only thing that comes to mind that I see a potential use for this might be a fruited sour, but if it throws phenolics then I’m not even sure about that. Maybe I might give it a shot if I get a decent harvest on my Key Lime tree this year.
That was another thought I had - that you could use it in a sour blend. Brett would probably convert some of those apple and POF+ notes to other flavors if given enough time.