Graham Wheeler recipe question

[canarytim]

Having gratefully received BYOBRA by Graham Wheeler for Christmas yesterday, I'm not clear which yeast is specified for each recipe. I would have thought using a particular yeast makes a big difference to the flavour etc of the beer. He has a chapter on yeast but no reference to yeast within the recipes themselves.

Am I missing something?

[WishboneBrewery]

Nope, its intentionally wrote that way, Yeast is your own choice

But yes it can make a big difference, don't expect Miracles when brewing your Favourite beer, Further brews and Tweaking could be needed to faithfully re-create a Pub bought ale.

[Barley Water]

I have made several beers from that book which turned out well. I also agree, yeast and how you handle it, makes a very big difference. If you check out the Mr. Malty website (which was put together by the great Jamil Z.) there is a yeast chart there which gives you the origin of several of the yeast strains sold by both Whitelabs as well as Wyeast. I think you will find that most useful when trying to figure out which yeast to use in a given recipe. As I have mentioned many times, I am a gigantic fan of all Fuller's products (I fully expect that both London Pride and London Porter are served regularly in heaven) so I use WLP02 for the Fuller's clones out of the book. You want that slight touch of diacetyl which that strain will add to the beer. There are several other well known British brewery strains sold as well so hopefully you can find something that will work well for you. Even using the same strain as the brewery however will not always get you exactly the same flavor, much depends on pitching rate, temperature, open or closed fermentation and even fermenter geometry. Once you get something you like, by all means mess with the formulation to suit your own tastes, that's the great thing about homebrewing, we can make a custom product specifically for us (I admit I screwed around with the London Pride recipe and I think it improved my version). Many of the big brewers change the formulations used to make even their most popular beers so things are always changing.