Rise of the Super Yeast: Will an ancient Norwegian yeast revolutionize American craft beer?

sounds like all the yeasts winemakers use

 

It will be interesting to see what these nearby breweries can accomplish. Sounds like there is the potential to save them some money and energy, with higher temperature tolerance and shorter fermentation time.

 

A local brewer used this yeast in a release late 2018.

Double Shift's Mareritt.

I thought the beer was enjoyable, but just okay. I would be interested in seeing it used more.

 

In answer to the question posed: no. It'll be incorporated into brewing techniques and be used to varying degrees by various brewers, just like any other yeast strain.

 

White wine yeast operates at Ale yeast temperature. Red wine yeasts go up to 80F. Kveik yeasts go up to 100F and are pretty clean.

Some breweries around me have made beers with Kveik yeasts, I can say those have been clean.

 

I tasted two identical beers fermented with hothead when it was still being tested by Omega for what it can handle at both ends of its temp range, and could not tell the difference.
At home, I've used the Hornindal and the Hothead, and can get from brewday to fully carbonated and in a glass in about a week.
I currently am using the Hornindal for a raw ale, and at day two they are content with about a inch and half head, and bubbling away.

 

Local brewery Benchtop loves the Norwegian yeast

 

If it has a reputation of fermenting "cleanly" in a short period of time (i.e., without producing many if any off flavors and aromas), then I'm guessing brewers are interested in two things: one, shorter turn around time*, and two, how much more they can get from volatile hop compounds.

Think especially about wet hop beers. Whether or not the drinker would notice much, if any difference is unclear to me, but if a brewer can say the hops in the beer in your glass were picked three or four days ago, then it's at least a selling point.


*it seems like brewers are using kveik right now for pale, hoppy beers. Because these already have a short turn around, compared to a lot of other popular styles, I'm guessing a bigger limitation is available budget for hop contracts and the cost of heavy dry-hopping regimes. So, I'm curious if kveik's short fermentation would actually make that much of a difference for most breweries pumping out pale, hoppy beers. I dunno. Thoughts?

 

Well I'm definitely curious about this, not for the short turn-around time, but for the fruitiness. If I could even slightly reduce my dry-hopping that would save me money. I might even be willing to continue with heavy hopping if the fruitiness from the yeast added that much more but I doubt it.

 

I have only had one beer fermented with a Kveik yeast strain so far (from a brewpub) and I was not a fan of the flavors of that beer; I would not consider ordering that beer again. I would not use the term of "off flavors" for that beer but the flavors the yeast produced were not favorable for my palate.

I will try other Kveik fermented beers in the future. Hopefully I will enjoy those?

Cheers!

P.S. Hopefully @Prep8611 will chime into this thread.

 

Is there a Kveikian in the house? (in addition to @Prep8611, .....@MrOH, @Lukass, @pweis909?)
Those, and others, have talked about using Kveik in their brews, and a search for Kveik in the HomeBrew forum returns seven pages of posts.

 

In the Philly area and if so which brewpub/beer? I am curious and would like to try it if there is a local option.

 

No, it was not local. A few months ago I took a road trip to/from Texas to visit family & friends. On the way we did some camping in Arkansas. There was a brewpub in Hot Springs that had a Kveik brewed beer on tap.

Are you willing to travel to South Jersey? Maybe @NeroFiddled will have a Kveik fermented beer available in the near future?

Cheers!

 

....my bad....I said @pweis909 in post 13 but meant @minderbender. Their avatars look (slightly) similar at a (really quick) glance.

 

I've fermented reds up to about 92-94 (I got nervous at that point), but reds routinely are fermented up to 90

 

I haven’t used any Norwegian or similarly derived strains yet. I’m intrigued, but I’m usually last out of the gate on these “new” brew trends. I’m still trying to figure out black IPA (pale and black at the same time?). After that, I want to try these new Citra hops I’ve heard so much about. It’s going to take some time before I get to kveik

 

I've brewed several beers with kveik that I enjoyed. In particular it works well in gose since its ideal temperature range overlaps significantly with the ideal temperature range for Lactobacillus. (Note that kveik is not a single strain of yeast but rather a general type of yeast used in a particular way in Norway. But for our purposes that doesn't matter much.)

I think kveik will definitely gain market share over time. I tend to think that its effect on the final product is not distinctive enough for it to be all that visible to the consumer. (In other words, maybe 20 years from now a lot of IPAs will be brewed with kveik, but they might not be labeled in a way that makes them distinguishable from other IPAs.) Whether that's truly transformative is a subjective question.

What I would point out, though, is that kveik really represents two different things. On the one hand, it's a remarkable organism for the reasons cited in the article. There's no question in my mind that as a yeast its brewing qualities will help it gain a foothold in craft beer. That is understandably the main focus for a lot of beer enthusiasts in the United States.

On the other hand, kveik is interwoven into Norwegian culture, and in particular into Norway's pre-industrial brewing culture. What I mean by that is that until very recently you wouldn't find kveik in any of Norway's commercial breweries. It is used by true farmhouse brewers who use it in very particular ways (for instance, they almost always use juniper extensively in their brewing). There are rich traditions associated with the beer brewed with kveik, such as the gjærkauk (yeast scream), the oppskåke (social gathering to drink freshly-brewed beer), and "roaring" the beer (heating it and releasing carbonation rapidly, making it "roar"). And check out the sweet "beer glove" at the top of this post.

This kind of brewing is endangered precisely because it is so particular to the culture in which it evolved. In most places (maybe everywhere) it is hard to obtain juniper in the quantities you would need for large-scale production of this type of beer. The beer is often raw (unboiled), leading to lower shelf stability, and in any case it is meant to be consumed very quickly after brewing is done. And even if you could overcome those limitations, I don't think it would taste the same from a tulip glass in a beer bar as it would out of a reused plastic soda bottle around a fire. (By the way, if you ever get to sample a Norwegian farmhouse beer, make sure to tell the brewer he or she must be very lazy. If you don't like the beer, on the other hand, tell the brewer that he or she must live near a great lake.)

I guess what I'm saying is that I hope kveik is transformative not just because it's a useful yeast but because it gives us a glimpse into a beautiful, vanishing way of life. It's a bit of a living fossil: Something like the current Norwegian farmhouse tradition would have been ubiquitous once, and it's died out nearly everywhere, driven out by cheap, consistent commercial beer. I don't think that's necessarily regrettable—there are few things in life better than cheap, consistent commercial beer—but it's a chance to reflect on what was and what could have been. And it's a chance to be a responsible "tourist," either in the literal sense or the figurative sense.

 

Thanks for the detailed analysis and comments. I really enjoyed your post.