recent exBEERiment result

i know this has been discussed before here, but look at the results on this: The Brü Club xBmt Series | Yeast Comparison: Imperial Yeast A09 Pub vs. Lallemand London ESB In American Brown Ale | Brülosophy

one beer finished at 1.013 and the other at 1.020 and he says “I attempted 4 triangle tests and got it correct 3 times, though it largely felt like guessing. These beers were extremely similar.”

the last time many years ago i had a beer finish at such an unwantedly high FG it was incredibly obvious. im really sick of hearing “these beers were indistinguishable” from them because its just not believable anymore.

i loved the concept of the experiments/results page but ive seen too many where i just think “that is impossible that there is no difference at all”.

while of course you might argue that i cant stop them from doing this and im doing nothing myself of this sort (i dont have the time or resources to btw) i feel like this is becoming a big source of misinformation. if you disagree please dont become emotional, i am absolutely willing to listen to divergent opinions.

The Lallemand London ESB yeast doesn’t ferment maltotriose (10-15% of all malt based worts). But, apparently that sugar (starch?) doesn’t taste sweet to humans. So, even though the gravity is high it doesn’t taste like one would expect.

I happen to have an ESB on draft now that was made with London ESB. It finished at 1020 SG. Indeed it doesn’t taste sweet. It tastes like a normal ESB. I was surprised.

PS. The Lallemand website now calls this yeast “LALBREW[emoji2400] LONDON ENGLISH-STYLE ALE YEAST”.

But they didn’t say “these beers were indistinguishable”.  The Brulosophy xBmts aren’t set up to be able to make such a conclusion.  When they don’t reach statistical significance, then no conclusion can be made one way or the other as to whether they are identical or not.  This is the way the “null hypothesis” works.

On the other hand, if their goal was only 80% confidence instead of 95% confidence, then they could have concluded “maybe there’s a difference, with about 80% confidence”.  But they think they’re cooler than that and always aim for 95% confidence.  THAT, I think, is the real problem with their setup of the xBmts.  They only seek the results when it’s super obvious to any dumb monkey that the two beers are totally different.  That’s what 95% confidence gives.  Personally I’m more interested in when the dumb monkeys are kind of sure that maybe there might be a difference.  That’s all the credit I can give to the dumb monkeys who are tasting these beers.  About 80% confidence.  Any higher than that is… like… not very useful IMO.  The results become more meaningful I think if we give the tasters LESS credit and choose not to be as confident in their results.  I know it might sound crazy but that’s my thoughts on the topic.

THAT is very true too.  I have used this yeast with similar results.  NOT sweet, even with high FG.

Lemme see here--------------am I more apt to trust the opinion of one taster or those of 10 out of 17 tasters? Did you brew the same basic beer as they did with the same yeasts? Tasting is subjective enough without comparing apples and oranges. I’ve been following Brulosophy since their inception and find that. taken in context, their exbeeriments and results are quite informative. They never imply that their results are Gospel either, which implies that YMMV.

Meh. I just take these as entertaining. Just a single data point to consider when I brew something similar.

How is it “misinformation”? They are reporting their results for a single test. You are certainly free to conduct a similar experiment yourself.

i appreciate the explanation of that yeasts inability to ferment maltotriose. thats exactly the kind of reply i want to hear. :slight_smile:

im scanning the exbeeriments pages i cant remember the ones i was referring to. but to summarize the misinformation that someone seems indignant at my suggestion of - i was enamored with the idea of single variable beer experiments at first, but after reading the ones on topics i was most interested in, i kept finding what i perceived to be poor analysis. not poor procedure. i don’t mean universally poor analysis among all experiments, but to me its very disappointing because it looks like they spend a lot of effort making a good experiment setup but then let who knows who (family, drinking buddies, beginner homebrewers?) determine differences in the beer.

Because people are getting upset I will no longer be replying to most things in this thread. But that is my two cents on exbeeriments and why I am no longer using them for information.

Even if you don’t taste the sweetness difference in these beers, you note the body difference. It may not be pronounced in a 2 oz tasting you do while drunk and eating nachos in a loud pub, but then the same could be true for plenty of moderate differences between beers, which is exactly why I consider XBMT data spurious.

It’s dangerous (to the extent that bad brewing advice can be dangerous) misinformation because the conclusions are presented in a way that indicates they can be relied upon and the ubiquity of this mostly bad advice-giving blog causes tons of not-quite-novice brewers to brew worse beer. Read any of the Reddit comments on these suspicious XBMTs and you will see plenty of brewers announcing, “wow, I’m done building starters” or “now I know I shouldn’t bother controlling fermentation temperature.” Even if these XBMTs are meant to be taken with a grain of salt, they are treated like gospel because they present bad data as though it was bona fide conclusive scientific evidence.

I agree completely.  They present one data point and are very up front that theirs is not any final say (there never will be).  Everyone is clearly acknowledging the limitations of their approach.  I wouldn’t characterize it as misinformation.

The problem is it’s a bad data point.

Why is their data bad?

In this hobby, I have come to learn that major bloggers and online merchants can’t be trusted with brewing advice because they have a profit motive in telling people what they want to hear.

The forums (except for Reddit, where it’s 95% bloggers and newbies) and clubs are the best places for advice.

I think maybe you sense ulterior motives where there are none.

The one time I’ve used this yeast was in an extract with specialty grains bitter that went from. 1.040 to 1.012.

Far from it – it took me a long while to realize that the reason I was seeing bad advice might be because someone profited from the bad advice (ad revenue). It hadn’t even occurred to me that homebrew blogs could be monetized. And when my own experience and the experience of brewers I know personally is directly contrary to what I read from a monetized blogger or merchant, I am inclined to trust myself and brewers whose beer I have actually tasted.

Having now tasted a ton of warm-fermented lager that people made because of the XBMT on the topic, I can pretty confidently say that they all sucked. If some people can’t taste the difference between fermentation flaws in a lager and a well made lager, they probably shouldn’t be taste-testing beer. But that XBMT has generated so many clicks because it tells people that what they want to hear is true.

At AHA conference there was a presentation by Fermentis. What do you do with the OEM taste panel that says there’s no perceptible difference in taste between a 34/70 lager fermented at 50F and one fermented at 60F?  I suppose these are professional tasters in a professionally run taste panel.

Maybe your friends’ lagers were fermented with a different yeast?  …or possibly other issues. [emoji2369]

I’ve used 34/70 as high as 62*F with great results.

Most were done with 34/70, but I recall at least one was S-189 (same problem). Maybe some were a few degrees warmer than 60F or they underpitched or something (I recall one guy insisting that starters weren’t necessary and that 2 packs of dry yeast wasn’t necessary because of something they read), but I have tasted the same problem many times to where I am able to spot it: “you fermented a lager at ale temps?” It is as obvious to me as, “you pitched one vial of liquid yeast without a starter and fermented it at ambient in a room temperature room?” I know exactly how that tastes because of how many times I encountered it – brewers didn’t know that fermentation temp and ambient temp were two different things and they underpitched because they didn’t know/understand/want to build a starter AND were scared away from dry yeast by the LHBS. Or how about using old LME and getting a tart “extract twang?” All of us probably know that flaw by taste because of how we started brewing. That’s how ubiquitous bad lager is at homebrew events now.

I find that the forums and the internet in general are full of good information and bad. It’s important to apply a filter. The best filter is trying things for yourself and sticking with what tastes good to you.

+1

Cheers to all of this.  :smiley: