Kveik

[McMullan]

Who can claim that so-called 'kveik' yeast has genuinely improved their beer? Relative to what? Answers from experienced home brewers we know and who are actually qualified enough to offer an informed, honest opinion to their community. Say, those who have been brewing more than 5 years at least. No 'newbs', especially from Norway I think it's time to promote an international competition among home brewers to fully assess just how much 'kveik' is 'online Nordic marketing'. Suffice to say Norwegians and anyone associated with financial aspirations to profiteer from 'kveik' directly, as a patented identity, or indirectly, via its online promotion, are excluded.

Let's find out exactly what 'kveik' can and can't do for your beer

Let the fun begin

[charliemartin]

I recently brewed my 100th beer (thread in Brewdays section) and coincidentally used Mangrove Jack's Voss Kveik yeast to ferment it.
Fermented at 35C in a fermentation fridge it was a strange experience. Opening the fridge to be met by a heatwave was unnerving to say the least.
I didn't find that it finished fermenting particularly quickly even at that temperature and it didn't attenuate quite as well as I expected, but it did produce a nice beer. Quite a pronounced orange flavour, although I can't say for sure how much the UK Cascade hops had to do with that. Nice mouthfeel too. The yeast does seem to flocculate quite well.
I am currently fermenting another beer with some slurry (1 tablespoonful) from that first brew. Started at 25C I checked the gravity after 3 days and it had only lost 10 points. Most yeasts I have used would have fermented out a bit further than that and some would be practically done. So I upped the temperature to 30C to try and get it to work a bit harder. Gravity after 5 days had dropped from OG of 1.044 to 1.017. Predicted FG of 1.010.
I believe it prefers high gravity beers otherwise you need to add yeast nutrient which I forgot to add to this brew so that may explain the slow fermentation.
I think it would be a good yeast for Summer brewing without temperature control and also if you want some orange in your beer, but I won't be giving up on other yeasts just yet.

Cheers,
Charliemartin

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[McMullan]

Thanks, Charlie. So basically not one for the drain but not your best beer either. Not exactly a reflection of the disproportionate kveik marketing claims and engineered online ‘hysteria’. That was my experience, although the fermentations proceeded a little better. I used liquid yeasts and oxygenated worts using pure O2. I treated them like Belgian Saison yeasts, as at the time some were claiming they were Norway’s equivalent of Belgian Farmhouse yeasts. I let the fermentation temperature rise to about 28℃. I found the ‘orange’ in Voss very bland and one-dimensional and did very little to complement the Saison style. I can certainly see it being lost in a UK Cascade IPA, which is likely to liven up most boring yeast strains, including Idun baker’s yeast, which some tasters preferred in blind tests.

So I concluded (after several attempts) that a Belgian Saison is best fermented by Belgian Saison yeasts. And the same goes for Belgian ales generally, British ales, German ales and so on. American ales (with all their hop overdosing) seem to be a possible exception. That seems to be where all the kveik fanboys are at; where yeast strain takes a back seat to hops screaming a bit on the loud side or at least swamping the entire recipe.