I absolutely love Vienna Lager, it’s one of the very few styles I regularly obsess about perfecting. Over the last couples years, I’ve been making small(ish) tweaks to my recipe from water chemistry and hops to adding small amounts of less conventional grains. For this xBmt, I was interested to taste the impact a couple different yeasts might have, so I split a batch and hit half with The Yeast Bay’s Franconian Dark Lager while the other was fermented with White Labs’ WLP940 Mexican Lager Yeast. Results are in!
My take on the WLP -940 is that it is too clean. A CAP that was split between 940 and 833 was tasted by some friends (BJCP National, and Certified Cicerone, tasting was not blind) both liked the 833, saying it was more “German”. I liked the 833.
I agree that it is remarkably clean. Franconian is very clean too, though to me has a very slight “beery” character that I just love, even if the majority couldn’t detect a difference :-\