Types of yeast

[nastyphoenix]

What types of yeast are best suited to pale and medium ales? Or does it depend more on the hops?

[Befuddler]

Your question is too broad..

Choosing the right yeast for the right style of beer comes with experience. It's not as simple as "use this yeast for pale beers" or "use this one for dark beers". The yeast choice and fermentation temperature have as much impact on the final beer as malt and hop choice. Look through the descriptions on the White Labs and Wyeast sites for more information on the properties of each strain.

Also, you can use this list on MrMalty to cross reference the White Labs and Wyeast products. They use a lot of the same (or very similar) strains, but the numbering is totally different.

If you're after a yeast in the specific style of a well known brewery, it's worth asking Brewlab if they have something similar.

[TheMumbler]

+1 to what Befuddler said. If you could give some examples of the kind of beer you'd like to brew that might help.

If you are relatively new to All Grain (AG) brewing I'd do a brew or two with dried yeast as they will be familiar from doing kits etc., so It would keep things simple for the moment. There is much less to choose from in the way of dried yeasts. Nottingham and S04 seem to be the most commonly used yeasts for ales, with nottingham being better for the paler ones IMO as it is a bit less fruity than S04. I have also used S33 for bitter and thought it worked fine. There is Windsor too which is another fruity one, but people often say it is a bit prone to sticking.

Lots of people use US05 for american style pale ales as it is very clean and lets the hops shine through so you might want to think about that. Personally I don't like it for bottles as it doesn't form a firm sediment in my experience.

I generally use Whitelabs liquid yeasts these days but I think I'd go with with Nottingham for what you are talking about if I was going for a dried yeast.

Temperature is going to effect things whatever yeast you use, have a look on the manufacurers websites here and here for info on pitching the yeast their recommended temperature range. Broadly speaking lower temperatures within the recommended range result in cleaner tasting beers.

[Barley Water]

Well, you asked about ale yeast which is a good thing, I can tell by your question that you are new to this game and it's always best to start with ales, they are easier to make. Most yeasts are referenced back to their country of origin, English, German, Belgian, American etc and they are used to make beer typical of their "native lands". Generally speaking, English ale yeasts have alot of character and most are lower attenuating (but there are always exceptions). German ale yeasts are cleaner and can work at slightly lower temperatures (Alt, Kosch etc. strains). American ale yeasts as noted by another poster work at normal ale temperatures and are pretty clean also (we specialize in hop delivery vehicles over here and we don't want anything getting in the way of hop bitterness and flavor). Finally, there are the Belgian strains and things get interesting quickly with these "bad boys". Many have unique flavors and tend to be pretty "fruity" even when compared to the British yeast strains.

As noted by another poster, what you do is pick the general style of beer you wish to brew. In your case, I suspect you would like to make say a special bitter or some other middle of the road English style beer. If that is the case, I think the dried English strains are probably a good place to start. Once you figure out how to make a decent wort, then I highly recommend playing around with the many different liquid yeast strains. Unlike making wine, beer flavor is heavily influced by yeast strain and brewing technique. You can take exactly the same wort and make the resulting beer taste radically different depending on what strain is used and how you handle the fermentation. Once you get the basics down, in time you will just "know" what works for you. If you stay at this hobby long enough, you will also some day "go to the dark side" and start messing around with wild yeasts and bacteria, it's a fun ride and a great learning adventure.

[Kev888]

As mentioned this is very broad; but if you're having trouble narrowing things down then (as a similarly broad) guide to what are probably the top three most commonly available yeasts:

I like US-05 for hoppy pale ales as it lets the hops through and doesn't impart much yeast character (to overshadow tastes from the pale grains) though its not especially flocculant. US-04 is fast and effective and adds more yeast character to the flavour, especially when fermented warmer, so (if you like its character) that can be good for more robust bitters and that sort of thing, and it settles well too. Nottingham is in between but probably closer to 05 than 04.

There's a lot more choice in liquid yeasts, so to take advantage of the subtleties available there you'd really need to be much more specific and compare with the manufacturer's notes.

Cheers
kev