Announcing the January/February 2013 Platinum Strains

We’re beyond excited to announce the first batch of 2013 Platinum Strains, which will be released in January.

Be sure to ask your homebrew shop about them and plan your brews accordingly!

WLP022 Essex Ale Yeast
Flavorful British style yeast. Drier finish than many British ale yeast. Produces slightly fruity and bready character.    Good top fermenting yeast strain, is well suited for top cropping (collecting). This yeast is well suited for classic British milds, pale ales, bitters, and stouts. Does not flocculate as much as WLP002 and WLP005.

WLP510 Bastogne Belgian Ale Yeast:
A high gravity, Trappist style ale yeast. Produces dry beer with slight acidic finish. More ‘clean’ fermentation character than WLP500 or WLP530. Not as spicy as WLP530 or WLP550. Excellent yeast for high gravity beers, Belgian ales, dubbels and trippels.

WLP815 Belgian Lager Yeast
Clean, crisp European lager yeast with low sulfur  production. The strain originates from a very old brewery in West Belgium. Great for European style pilsners, dark lagers, Vienna lager, and American style lagers.

White Labs & AleSmith Collaboration Tasting

Join us on December 3rd in the White Labs Tasting Room for a very special, one time-only event. We’ve teamed up with one of our favorite breweries on the planet, the superb AleSmith Brewing Company, to put together a Tap Takeover, White Labs-style!

AleSmith provided us with some of their Wee Heavy wort and we’ve fermented it with 16 (!) different yeast strains, all of which will be on tap on Monday the 3rd for the release party (and will remain on tap until finished, which means they could be on tap for several weeks). The good folks at AleSmith had the idea to try to bring out the characteristics of a Weizen Bock in Wee Heavy using yeast and fermentation alone, and we’ve used a wide variety of strains- from Hefes to Belgians- to elicit significant changes in the flavor profile.

Simply put, this event is not to be missed!

Happy Pure Culture Anniversary!

On this day in 1883, Emil Christian Hansen was the first scientist in history to successfully create a pure yeast culture for use in brewing. He was head of the Carlsberg Research Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark and his work stood on the shoulders of Louis Pasteur who had published novel techniques a few years earlier.

Hansen’s technique was elegant. By performing serial dilutions of a yeast culture from the brewery he ended up isolating single cells, just like in later plating techniques. Enriching the single-cell solutions by additions of sterile wort lead to multiplication of the cells. From there, Hansen performed a stepwise propagation where a culture was added to a larger volume of wort and left to multiply over and over again. The result was a yeast slurry, wherein all the cells originated from the original mother cell. At last, the first pure yeast culture was a reality!

 

This innovation was shared with the brewing community in Europe and cured the “beer disease” (i.e. contaminated beer) that was a huge problem in Europe at the time.

 

129 years have gone by and today and we still use many of the same techniques every day at White Labs.