Red Star Quick Rising Bread Yeast

[KenHarmon]

My father and I have been brewing all grain together for about 8 years now. He bought a couple of Brewers Best kits that he found on sale about two years ago thinking that we could doctor them up and make dark ales in between brewing our lagers. About 9 months ago dad was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. So we had not brewed in quite some time while he battled cancer. He finally beat it and was looking good and pretty much back to his old self when he came down with a bad cold. As his immune system had been brought down by the cancer drugs he continued to get worse and finally passed away about two weeks ago. When I was going through his stuff I ran across the beer kits that he bought and I decided on the spur of the moment yesterday to make the brown English ale. I made a yeast starter early and proceeded with the boil. I noticed that the yeast had not done anything after three hours. I hurried up and made another slurry of yeast from the other kit with no better results. As I am not a kit brewer and had no other ale yeast available (and I am a little bit of an experimenter..) I decided to pitch three teaspoons of Red Star Quick Rising Bread Yeast into the fermenting bucket. Within an hour the airlock was bubbling pretty well and was still doing well this morning. I have read many articles where people said never use bread yeast so I don't know what to expect as far as taste I figure to get the beer off of the wort into a secondary as quickly as possible to help alleviate any off tastes. My question is, has anyone else ever brewed with baking yeast? I'm not really looking for answers from those who used it years ago but recently. Also, looking for any thoughts anyone may have who knows a little more about yeast than I do. We usually stuck with the liquid yeast that best matched the ale or lager that we brewed. Thanks.

Ken Harmon

[loud1]

Wow, I'm very sorry to hear about your father.  I had been making wine with my father for years and he finally decided to stop, so I took up making beer (I don't really care much for wine).  He has become my partner in crime ever since, I dread the day when i don't have my brew buddy anymore.

Anyway, as for the yeast.  Most of the time people warn against bakers yeast because of the question of purity, up until the 70's purity was a real problem but the processes have been refined considerably since then,  I believe that problem still may exist but to a lesser degree now.  Bakers yeast is basically the same strain as Ale yeast so as long as you don't detect any off smells or flavors during fermentation you should be golden.

If anyone has more information please correct me.

Louis

[KenHarmon]

Thanks Louis. It's been a tough couple of weeks. I had read that bakers yeast was similar to ale yeast also. That's one of the reasons I didn't toss in a lager yeast that I had and try to produce a dark lager.

[happy hillbilly]

ol Happy here. Long time ago my friend and father in law gave me his special beer recipe. Once he decided to give it to me (the recipe that is ) we set down and he told me everything there was to makin beer. He started way back when. Anyhow I was to go to the grocery store n git two cans of malt some sugar n one cake of yeast. Well the malt turned out to be the infamous Premier malt.If you dont know bout this look it up cause it become famous durin prohibition. Back then they would send you instructions for brewin in a brown package. The yeast you got was just ole bread yeast. I did make some brew with that malt but I moved on. But I have been in a pinch before n put in some regular yeast Ugh ok. Good luck I bet ya aint the first one to not like the beer ya made.  Happy Brewin to ya sorry bout yer loss.

[KenHarmon]

Answer to my own question......DON"T USE BREAD YEAST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[brewfun]

Hold on, Ken...

Your update would have been my advice under most any other circumstance.

But, unless it's gone horribly sour or worse, I want to advise some patience. Many of the fast acting bread yeasts are lager-like strains with extra enzymatic abilities. So, they create a ton of esters and byproducts to make CO2, but not always great alcohol. They're not always Saccharomyces, either.

It's only been 7 days. If primary is done, just lager it for a few weeks and see what happens. Sometimes, it will clean itself up. 

To be fully sure, you can rack the beer, and krausen using a vigorous lager starter at about 20% of your volume (a gallon, I'd assume). The additional yeast activity will scrub out a lot of eters and clean up the fermentation quite a lot. Maybe not perfectly, but a lot better than it seems to be, now.

[KenHarmon]

Too late BrewFun....I dumped it. It's taste wasn't good but it gave you the very dry feeling on the back of your toungue. Almost like it dried our mouth out.

[Maine Homebrewer]

I've made fruit wine with bread yeast and it had yeasty or bready aroma and aftertaste. Wouldn't recommend it.

Sorry about your pops. And the tossed brew.