My father and I have been brewing all grain together for about 8 years now. He bought a couple of Brewers Best kits that he found on sale about two years ago thinking that we could doctor them up and make dark ales in between brewing our lagers. About 9 months ago dad was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. So we had not brewed in quite some time while he battled cancer. He finally beat it and was looking good and pretty much back to his old self when he came down with a bad cold. As his immune system had been brought down by the cancer drugs he continued to get worse and finally passed away about two weeks ago. When I was going through his stuff I ran across the beer kits that he bought and I decided on the spur of the moment yesterday to make the brown English ale. I made a yeast starter early and proceeded with the boil. I noticed that the yeast had not done anything after three hours. I hurried up and made another slurry of yeast from the other kit with no better results. As I am not a kit brewer and had no other ale yeast available (and I am a little bit of an experimenter..) I decided to pitch three teaspoons of Red Star Quick Rising Bread Yeast into the fermenting bucket. Within an hour the airlock was bubbling pretty well and was still doing well this morning. I have read many articles where people said never use bread yeast so I don't know what to expect as far as taste I figure to get the beer off of the wort into a secondary as quickly as possible to help alleviate any off tastes. My question is, has anyone else ever brewed with baking yeast? I'm not really looking for answers from those who used it years ago but recently. Also, looking for any thoughts anyone may have who knows a little more about yeast than I do. We usually stuck with the liquid yeast that best matched the ale or lager that we brewed. Thanks.
Ken Harmon
Ken Harmon