Of course, I delayed the post a little because The cherry season has already passed, but what’s done is done, it’s better now than even later. So it wassqueezed 15 liters of fresh cherry juice, which was boiled, cooled, 8 liters were added. water and 2 kg glucose.

The purpose of the experiment is to compare 3 types wine yeast under the same conditions, fermentation and its result. Yellow package - Champagne, blue - Premier Cuvi, red - Montrachet.
So we rehydrate the yeast in 300 ml. water, carefully scatter the contents of the sachets over the surface.

On next photo it is clear that the Kuvi yeast rehydrated very quickly, literally in 1-2 minutes, I don’t know what this is connected with and we’ll see how they behave further.

When all the yeast has settled, after 15 minutes we close all the jars with a lid and mix well, after which we add a little juice to each jar.

We close everything with lids with water seals and wait an hour or two for the yeast to wake up.

Pour equal parts of our juice into pre-prepared bottles and add yeast, not forgetting to label the bottles first.

Here in the photo above is the result after 5 hours from the moment of starting the yeast. The activity of the yeast from the yellow packet is immediately noticeable; by the way, it is with this that brewers sometimes forcibly carbonate already fermented beer for maturation in the bottle, and sometimes they are added for secondary fermentation to prepare Barleywine (a dark, dense type of beer).

After 7 hours we see this. In terms of foam, all 3 specimens are almost level, but there is still less foam on the left and more in the center.

And here is the situation in the bottles an hour later, the water seals are seething at 3-4 “gurgles” per minute. After all this I went to bed, and this is what I saw the next morning.

A little “surprise” from the middle bottle; I opened the cap later and immediately thought about possible consequences, when a winemaker friend of mine had a bottle burst in his basement due to a clogged water seal. He used a rubber stopper with a drain tube. I don’t even want to imagine what would have happened in the kitchen if this had happened to my bottle. After “washing away” the cherry traces, the bottle quickly moved to the basement. Perhaps you shouldn’t have put a whole bag into 7-8 liters, but you can’t return anything back.

In the basement, the active phase of fermentation passed in 10 days, then the same amount gurgled, but weakly, and for 10 days it was almost quiet. After that, I eagerly took a sample.

So the results, of course, are not final, but preliminary, so to speak, straight from the boiler).
1 bottle - Cuvee yeast - very dryly fermented, strong, ethanol is even slightly noticeable in the taste, like in fortified wine. The aroma is fruity, but not cherry, moderate. As a plus for this yeast, there is little foam in the fermentation tank.

2nd bottle - Champague - dry, the strength is not so pronounced and the ethanol is not noticeable in the taste, it’s already pleasant to drink, the aroma is neutral, very similar to grape, which was surprising.

3 bottle - Montrachet - very dryly fermented, the aroma is anything but cherry, bright, rich, grape-barberry, as it seemed to me. I liked the color - dark red, deep, not the same as in previous samples. It's pleasant to drink, although the aftertaste is certainly not particularly pronounced.

Now all that remains is to filter everything and bottle it for at least half a year. For further pleasant experiments in cold weather))

Some experts believe that craft beer is a threat to wine that is taking consumers away from it. Others, on the contrary, are sure that beer and wine are developing in parallel, without interfering or helping each other. Who is right? Joshua M. Bernstein in Imbibe magazine explains how American craft brewers are adopting production techniques and marketing techniques from winemakers.

One day in 1997, Blaine Landberg faced difficulties. A 19-year-old student at the University of California at Berkeley bought a set for home brewing to clone Duvel Strong Belgian Ale. Instead of adding Belgian caramel sugar, which is used to increase the alcohol content without the extra body, he used honey. It ended up being too sweet.

“I didn’t know anything about yeast health back then,” Landberg said.

While searching for a solution, he found an article that stated that champagne yeast could quickly start fermentation and “dry out” the beer. So he added wine yeast to his “mistake” and tasted it again—“and it tasted better than anything I’d ever tasted,” recalls Landberg, who named the drink Buzzerkeley, a play on the name of his Berkeley campus.

Soon the university administration closed down the illegal dorm brewery, but Landberg already knew that he had found his world. He put this idea aside long box- until the time when he opens his brewery. He worked for Honest Tea for more than 10 years, and in 2012 he founded his own brewery, Calicraft Brewing. Calicraft uses California ingredients like malt, hops and honey, and its flagship is a juicy ale fermented with champagne yeast, the same Buzzerkeley - a fizzy beer-wine hybrid born in a Berkeley dorm.

Generally speaking, barley and grapes have never been the best of friends. They go their own ways and have their own fans. To bridge the gap between beer and wine, brewers first borrowed old wine barrels. Then they went further and began to add grapes to beer (juice, crushed berries or must) or ferment it with wine yeast, getting a hybrid drink.

Grapes are the fuel for Dogfish Head's Noble Rot and Sixty-One IPA. Odell Jaunt uses Riesling grape juice, while Allagash uses fresh grapes in its Victor and Victoria Belgian ales. Brooklyn Brewery finishes its Sorachi Ace saison with Champagne yeast, and Enlightenment Ales uses the champagne method for Brut.

Tricks and squeezes

Fruits beloved by brewers can make a great grocery store selection: oranges and apples, lemons and limes, strawberries, watermelon, cherries... But what about grapes? Previously it was believed that it was only for winemakers. But brewers continue to combine the incongruous.

The Grapevine called Dogfish Head founder Sam Calagione in 1996, shortly after he opened a brewpub in Delaware. The winter was mild, and Calagione began dreaming of the perfect pairing for a steak on a wood-fired grill. During his searches, he constantly came across cabernet and wondered - is the grape so important? So Calagione decided to brew a beer with partially dried green raisins.

“To find the perfect pairing for the steak, I went backwards,” Sam recalls the process of creating the Raison D’Être recipe.

The vine quickly became Sam's muse. He used muscat grapes in Midas Touch, a hybrid between beer, wine and mead (a recipe inspired by an archaeological find in the tomb of a Phrygian king), and in Chateau Jiahu, another “archaeological” beer based on an ancient Chinese recipe.

“Our ancestors have been combining wine and beer since the dawn of civilization,” says Calagione.

Having warmed up, Dogfish Head released Red & White in 2007, witbier fermented with pinot noir juice, and in 2011 Noble Rot, which used Viognier grapes affected by botrytis.

“This is actually the maximum amount of grapes we can put in beer and call it beer,” Calagione says of this recipe, which contains 49.9% grapes.

Another hybrid was inspired by spilled wine. While drinking with friends, Calagione accidentally spilled some red wine in his 60 Minute IPA. The result was a complex, fruity and stunningly bitter drink. To recreate the blend, Sam spent a year experimenting with grape varieties before choosing Syrah to create Sixty-One IPA.

“Its bright red color puts you in a wine mood,” says Calagione, noting that this release quickly gained popularity.

Odell Brewery quality control manager Eli Kolodny had never thought much about wine, but while touring the hop fields of Colorado, a vineyard caught his eye.

“I never thought before that you could grow grapes in Colorado.”

And then he thought - how can grapes be used in beer? The answer was Amuste, a rich imperial porter blended with Tempranillo must and aged in red wine barrels. The second act was Jaunt, a pale ale with local Riesling grapes aged at oak chips. Both varieties were hybrids both in terms of recipe and positioning.

“They were sold in liquor stores, places where you wouldn’t normally find beer,” Eli says.

Liquor stores would be a great home for the zesty Cascade The Vine, which undergoes secondary fermentation with the juice. white grapes, and for the fragrant Captain Lawrence Rosso e Marrone, using merlot and zinfandel. The same goes for Lover Beer's fruity and sour BeerBera, which uses Italian Barbera wort; with Cerveza de Tempranillo and Bière de Merlot from Jester King, for which the mature sour beer is second-fermented with grapes; and with Victor and Victoria, in which Allagash uses cabernet franc and chardonnay, respectively.

“A lot of wine drinkers only drink wine,” says Allagash brewer Jason Perkins. - Beers like Victor and Victoria are another way to attract them to your side.

Finding your style

It is clear that brewers still prefer lager and ale yeasts, which eat both complex and simple sugars in wort. Wine yeast selects simple sugars similar to those in grapes.

“If you add wine yeast to wort, it will start working like crazy, but then calm down,” Perkins says. “Then they will “eat” complex sugars, but it will take a long, long, long time - like trying to chew toffee without the help of molars.

To keep the fermentation tanks occupied for too long, Perkins uses a fairly aggressive strain of yeast and adds about 30% grapes to the beer, but even then he still has to add ale yeast to “polish.” Before bottling, as a final note, he adds champagne yeast, which gives an elegant effervescence. He especially likes to use champagne yeast for the finishing fermentation of sour beers.

“It gives a nice, clean taste,” he says, “and Champagne yeast can survive in harsh environments.”

But they can create it. If you add a mixture of brewer's yeast to the wort, they will coexist more or less harmoniously. Add wine yeast and they look like a psychopath from a horror movie who carried out a massacre in a women's dormitory.

“Most races of wine yeast are killers,” says Landberg, noting that they produce toxins that are lethal to brewer’s yeast. “But beyond that, they create flavors that are very different from those typically found in beer.

Landberg lives in wine region California, and many Californians love both wine and beer.

“I wanted to bring elements of winemaking into brewing, but to do this I had to go beyond sours.

The answer was Buzzerkeley with champagne yeast. Landberg mastered the finicky yeast and perfected the fermentation technology, which lasted three to three and a half weeks. This sounds good, but this period is about 40% longer than the average ale fermentation. But waiting is the price of achieving a goal. It ages the beer in barrels with wine pomace and calls it sparkling ale. This definition makes beer experts' hair stand on end.

“They tell me: you can’t call beer that, there’s no such category,” says Landberg.

Another new category is Beer de Champagne. It resembles in many ways a sparkling wine(another name for this style is beer brut) and goes through several long stages of fermentation. The bottles are also slowly turned over to collect the sediment in the neck, and then frozen and quickly uncorked to remove the sediment (in the production of champagne, these operations are called remuage and disgorgement). The Belians Bosteels and Malheur were the first to use this practice. One day Ben Howe from Boston, then working as an assistant brewer at Cambridge Brewing, received a bottle of Bosteels Deus Brut des Flandres from his boss and was inspired.

“It was a great beer,” recalls Howe, who decided to create something similar. First try on my home brewery It was timed to coincide with the inauguration of Barack Obama in 2008. At first everything went according to plan until Howe tried to freeze the necks of the bottles with liquid nitrogen. They started to explode. Howe came up with new technology- He began to immerse the necks in dry ice with alcohol. By 2012, he opened Enlightenment Ales, America's first brewery dedicated to Beer de Champagne. Its flagship is the effervescent Brut, which is born as a Belgian strong ale and then goes through champagne and secondary fermentation with champagne yeast.

— Brut is in huge demand during the holidays. Sometimes I do tastings in stores, and wine lovers refuse to try it, saying, “Oh no, I don’t like beer,” but when I persuade them, they ask, “Is this beer?” says Ben Howe.

Winemaker's Rules

Wine is a product of time. To help cover your expenses while you wait, many wineries offer club programs: Buy a membership and you'll get wine and other goodies. The same club programs can help raise funds for breweries that spend a lot of time producing barrel-aged and sour beers.

When Chad Jacobson opened Crooked Stave in 2011, he knew it would take a long time for wild yeast beers to develop the desired flavors. To receive an influx of funds, he launched the Cellar Reserve membership program. Its participants receive glasses, discount cards and, of course, beer.

“For the most part, Cellar Reserve is what keeps us afloat,” says Jacobson.

Clubs are another technology borrowed by brewers from winemakers. El Catador (Cigar City Brewery) and Collected Works (Hill Farmstead Brewery) provide members with exclusive barrel-aged beers. Do you prefer it sour? There's Night Shift Brewery's Barrel Society and Rare Barrel Brewery's Founders Club, please. The goal of such clubs is not an immediate influx of profit, but financing the future.

“We depend on raw materials, so we have to maximize the profit from each bottle,” says Rare Barrel co-founder Alex Wallesch.

This style of sales, like that of winemakers - direct to the consumer - eliminates the profit of middlemen and allows club members to establish deep connections with the brewery itself, and not just with its beer.

“We get to know our consumers better, establish connections with them and get feedback,” says Wallesch. “And consumers can get beer without queuing.”

California's The Bruery also opened a club program. In 2009, they released an imperial stout, Black Tuesday, which had fans lining up for hours and many leaving empty-handed. Then the brewery found a better way to serve customers quickly and efficiently: it pre-sold the stout online, and only Reserve Society members could purchase it. The club, which gives members access to exclusive brews and invitations to parties, later expanded to include three levels of membership.

“These club programs not only help build community, but also help them move forward in an increasingly saturated market. The more breweries sell on their own, the easier it will be for them to make a profit on a relatively small scale, says The Bruery founder Patrick Rue.

Although there are already about five thousand breweries in America, many of them are very tiny, and for them clubs are a great plan. Such kids as Transmitter Brewing, Burlington Beer and Trve Brewing have already created their own clubs. This is to be expected: like chicken, brewers are adopting and mastering techniques from other industries. By integrating wine ingredients, technology and operating principles into craft beer, brewers are creating a new world and making it clear to consumers that both beverages can have a place in their lives.

Sam Calagione remembers walking into a general store in Maine one day and noticing that Midas Touch and Noble Rot were in the wine section and Sixty-One IPA was in the beer section. He asked the store owner, and he answered that Sixty-One is more often purchased by beer lovers who also drink wine, while Midas Touch and Noble Rot, on the contrary, are chosen by wine lovers who also drink beer. Calagione was shocked.

“Then I realized how far we had come.” In a typical general store in rural Maine, the clientele tells the owner that some of the beer might be better off on the wine rack. And we didn't put any effort into it!

This or that type of beer. This table makes life a lot easier for the brewer when selecting yeast.

Today I would like to dwell in more detail on this topic - yeast in brewing.

Yeast is a single-celled microorganism that gets its energy from:

• aerobically (in the presence of oxygen through respiration);
• anaerobically (by fermentation).

Here I have given you an excerpt from Kunze.

When making beer, the sugars in the wort are fermented by yeast, resulting in alcohol and carbon dioxide. For this purpose, a type of yeast is used in brewing - Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Selected strains of these yeasts are systematically bred as pure culture and grown as brewer's yeast. Other strains are used as baking, spirit or wine strains.

Yeast reproduction and growth.

Yeast reproduces by budding, that is, a bud (bulge) is formed from the mother’s cell, into which part of the cytoplasm and a daughter nucleus depart. In some strains, as a result of division, the daughter cell is completely separated, in others it grows together, forming entire families. If the yeast is transferred into a nutrient solution for it, as we do when sowing wort, then its reproduction is accelerated. Moreover, this growth is characterized by certain phases.

• The latent phase is the acceleration phase, in which metabolism is activated. The duration of the latent phase can vary greatly and is highly dependent on the strain and conditions. Ends with the beginning of cell division.
• Acceleration phase - in this phase, cell division accelerates.
• Exponential phase- it is also called the logarithmic phase. At this point, cell growth occurs exponentially. In it, the reproduction rate remains constant and maximum.
• Slowdown phase - as a result of the wort being depleted of nutrients, a slowdown phase occurs. As a result, the proliferation of microorganisms slows down.
• Stationary phase- in the stationary phase, complete equilibrium is established. The number of dead cells is equal to the number of newly formed cells during division.
• The dying phase is when the number of newly appeared cells becomes less than the dying ones.

The duration of passage of individual phases is greatly influenced by the medium (beer wort), the temperature and viability of the microorganisms themselves, as well as the composition of the water and its oxygen saturation.

Wort (or substrate) - must contain a sufficient amount nutrients for cell growth and division. As for the water used in the substrate, it is worth considering the fact that yeast prefers a more acidic environment. Therefore, it is important to pay attention to the pH of the water. In addition, for cell division it is necessary to ensure good saturation of water with oxygen. Without it, life is simply impossible.

The optimal temperature for the growth of yeast of the genus Saccharomyces lies in the range of 25-30 degrees Celsius; growth and cell division are also possible in a wider range - 0-40 degrees.

Characteristics of brewing yeast.

Among the yeasts of the Sacchoromyces species, which are mainly used in brewing, there are numerous strains. These strains are divided into two groups - riding yeast And bottom fermentation. There are a number of differences between these groups.

Bottom-fermenting yeast, when dividing, most often completely separates from the parent cell, in some cases forming a pair. In top-fermenting yeast, cells most often long time are connected and form entire yeast communities. Although they are completely similar in cell shape.

Most significant difference grassroots and top yeast lies in their physiology, to be more precise - in the fermentation of the trisaccharide raffinose. Lower yeasts can completely ferment raffinose, while upper yeasts ferment only one-third of it. Another physiological difference between them is the course of metabolism. If lower yeast uses metabolism during the fermentation process, then upper yeast uses it exclusively through respiration.

The yeast strains got their name for the difference in the fermentation process. Top yeast generally rises to the top during the fermentation process. At the end of the fermentation process, the bottom yeasts sink to the bottom, the top yeasts will also sink over time, but this happens much later.

The possibility of flocculation is another distinctive feature grassroots yeast. Based on this feature, they are divided into dust-like and flocculent. In pulverized yeast, the cells are distributed in the fermenting wort and slowly sink to the bottom as a result of the end of the process. Floc yeast cells form “flakes” and quickly settle. Flocked yeast produces a beer that is clearer but has a lower attenuation rate. While dusty bottom yeast and top yeast produce less clear beer, but with a higher degree of fermentation.

Another distinctive characteristic is the optimal fermentation temperature. For riding horses it lies in the range of 16-25g, and for grassroots this limit is 5-12g.

All these factors should be taken into account when choosing a particular yeast strain.

An interesting fact remains that the species Saccharomyces cerevisiae includes not only cultivated strains that are used in brewing, but also “dangerous” yeast. The introduction of such yeast into the wort is called “contamination.” And these microorganisms are called “wild” yeast.

Beer question at a wine tasting... September 24th, 2011

At a recent club tasting "750ml" I was asked this question - “But in wine, is there top or bottom fermentation?” Since, besides the fact that such terms relate to the brewing process, I knew nothing about it, and “calling a friend” was not included in this quiz, I had to take time for additional preparation.

First, a few words about beer.
Beer, like wine, is a fermentation product. Just like in wine, in beer yeast converts sugar into ethanol and carbon dioxide. But if in grape juice sugar accumulates naturally when berries ripen, then beer wort sugar is formed due to step by step process transformation of starch contained in malt under the influence of gradual controlled heating (digestion) with long pauses.
After filtration, the prepared (sugarified) wort is boiled together with hops. Once again filtered, the additionally cooled and aerated wort is sent to fermentation tanks. This is where the difference between “top” and “bottom” fermentation appears.
The technology of top fermentation allows us to obtain those types of beer that are commonly called ales, and the technology of bottom fermentation those that are called lagers.
The difference between technologies is primarily due to which yeast is involved in the process.
Today for cooking different types beer, different cultural races of yeast are used. Only one type of beer - Belgian Lambic produced by spontaneous fermentation.
For the production of ales, top-fermenting yeast is used - Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is active at temperatures of 15 - 20°C. For the production of lagers, bottom-fermenting yeast is used - Saccharomyces uvarum, or Saccharomyces carlsbergensis optimal temperature for their life activity the range of 6 - 9°C is considered.
However, with “bottom” fermentation, the yeast still begins its long work in the upper part of the fermentation tank, but when it dies, it sinks to the bottom and forms a dense sediment. ... Doesn’t it remind you of anything?
It turns out that, in essence, the terms “top” and “bottom” fermentation are quite arbitrary and are of a technical or even practical, rather than strictly scientific nature.
Well, enough about beer.

With wine, everything is much more complicated.
In wine production they are used as wild yeast, formed on berries, and cultivated races of yeast. Moreover, both wild and cultivated yeasts used in wine production can be of several genera and numerous species within one genus (I will definitely name my next character in WoW - a gnome warrior - Schizosaccharomyces).

At the same time, wild ones “fight” with cultural ones, and cultural ones fight with each other. different stages fermentation, with different temperatures. The results of these clashes (they say “antagonism”, like between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie) are not always predictable. And you have to be a truly experienced and knowledgeable oenologist to create quality wine, using and even provoking such conflicts.
In general, the attitude of winemakers to what yeast (wild or cultivated) should be used changed as experience and knowledge accumulated. Today's point of view (as I understand it, having immersed myself in textbooks and articles on winemaking) is that cultivated yeast should not conflict with wild yeast, but replace it at the right time.

As for the temperature at which all these battle scenes and symbioses unfold, I’d rather give a quote from the textbook “Theory and Practice of Winemaking” ( “SCIENCES ET TECHNIQUES DU VIN” Jean RIBEREAU-GAYON, Emile PEYNAUD, Pascal RIBEREAU-GAYON, Pierre SUDRAUD ):
“The following fermentation temperatures can be considered optimal:
a) Winemaking using the red method - from 25 to 30°C. Wines intended for current consumption are prepared at lower temperatures (25°C), allowing the aroma of the variety to be preserved. For wines intended for aging, for which it is necessary to extract a sufficient amount of phenolic substances from the skins and seeds, more is preferable heat, approximately 30°C.
b) Winemaking by white way and cooking rose wines- from 18 to 20°C. Relatively low temperature is a necessary condition for the production of white aromatic wines. Today it can be argued that there should be no white wines fermented at temperatures above 20°C. Perhaps even more low temperatures(15 and even 10°C) will give wine High Quality compared to high<20°С). Нет уверенности, что улучшение качества будет сопоставимо с затратами, необходимыми для получения соответствующего охлаждения. Способы охлаждения, которые нужно применять для поддержания в бродильном резервуаре температуры 20 или 10°С, далеко не одинаковы. Наконец, при слишком низкой температуре развитие дрожжей становится недостаточным, и можно опасаться затруднений в завершении брожения.»

As you can see, the coldest fermentation temperatures for wine are still higher than for “grassroots” beer. It would seem that based on this criterion one can give an answer, that all wine is an alcoholic drink of “top” fermentation.

However, there is a whole class of white wines, the production technology of which, in one but defining detail, exactly repeats the technology of producing bottom-fermented beer. Such an element common to the technology of preparing lagers and wines, which is usually designated in winemaking by the term (and the inscription on the label) "sur lie", is aging on lees formed from particles of dead yeast. Although yeast in brewing and winemaking is completely different, the temperatures at which fermentation occurs are also different, but the result is the same - fermentation stops when all the sugar has been converted into alcohol by the yeast, or limiting factors have come into force that stopped fermentation (low temperature, high alcohol, fermentation inhibitors). Further aging of “sur lie” wines and “bottom” beer takes place on the lees at fairly low temperatures (different for beer and wine), and the wine is regularly mixed with the lees (I could not find information about stirring aged beer).
The French Wikipedia article on lees aging technology so simply combines both winemaking and brewing in this context. Since the practice of producing white wines with lees aging is widespread today, would it perhaps be justifiable to classify these wines as “bottom-fermented” wines?

I think it’s time to summarize and draw conclusions:
1) Unlike brewing, wine production uses a wider range of microorganisms - yeast and bacteria (I deliberately did not mention the latter so as not to complicate the already rather lengthy narrative), capable of existing and performing their functions in a wide range of temperatures. But wine microorganisms are most active at temperatures in the range of 15 – 30°C. This temperature range roughly corresponds to the designation “top fermentation” used in brewing.
2) There is a class of white wines, for the production of which the fermentation of the must is carried out at the same temperatures and using the same yeasts as for other white wines, but subsequently aged on lees formed by the remains of dead yeast. This aging corresponds to the “bottom fermentation” technology.
3) And yet, the use of the terms “top” and “bottom” fermentation is a characteristic feature of the brewing industry. It is not correct to apply these terms from brewing practice to winemaking and wine. Trying to “stretch” brewing terms onto the winemaking process, you can get thoroughly confused. Additional complication of the already complex and rich oenological terminology is unlikely to benefit anyone who wants to understand the intricacies (or at least the basics) of this science.

Why did I write all this? And for the fact that every recorder should try to play the tinwhistle in order to find out what “overblowing” is - that is, to broaden his horizons.