Philly Sour Yeast

https://www.lallemandbrewing.com/en/united-states/product-details/wildbrew-philly-sour/

Anyone have any information on this?

I have 6 packs in the fridge. What do you want to know?

Why so many?  I didn’t think of you as a sour beer guy…doing an experiment of some sort?

Lallemand sent them to me to try out

Just wondering if anyone had any experience with using it.  Tips, tricks, temps, etc.

Or is it more of a straightforward pitch and ferment?

I realize it’s new, so probably not a lot of communal knowledge just yet.

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.

Got it. Thanks. Maybe I’ll dust off and finally find a use for the old glass carboy. lol.

That’s not the impression I got from Lallemand.

seems like common sense to have a healthy respect for the impact of introducing a hop tolerant lactic acid producing organism into your brewery.

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.

Interesting to hear firsthand impressions. I’ve been curious about it for a while now.

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.

I wonder if you could use it to start an ersatz Oud Bruin and then add Brett at bottling or something like that.

But maybe the apple notes wouldn’t work for that…

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.

What was your impression of this strain?

Philly sour yeast…drink three pints of homebrew fermented with this yeast and you will be ready to throw snow balls at Santa Claus.

. . . :thinking: . . . Is that a warning or an endorsement?

Never got around to using them. Just not really into sours enough to have 5 gal. around. Gave them to my club raffle.