Will Champagne yeast REALLY dry out a big beer

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[NHBrewer]

Listen to the Session with Shea Comfort to get an idea on when it is and when it is not appropriate to use wine yeasts in your beer. The short answer is most likely no it will not dry out your beer, lager yeast on the other hand may help.

Chris

[BarefootLion]

Well if you think that wine yeast will not consume maltotriose and other larger sugars that beer yeast will consume. But, beer yeast will go after the free glucose and small sugars first, then go to the bigger sugars..that's just evolutionary take the easy route then work your way down the line.
So what is left of the fermentation, odds are the yeast ate all the small sugars and have left the larger sugars. Did the alcohol kill the yeast? Did they just floc out? Have you tried to rouse the yeast(warm it, blend it back into solution)?

Basically my suggestion is to do what you can to get this fermentation through, maybe even toss in a tougher yeast strain to finish the job, at this it it shouldn't contribute much to flavor.

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[Bugeater]

The wine yeast might work for the reasons given above plus the fact that it is more alcohol tolerant. I stay away from champagne/wine yeasts in beer because I do notice some strange esters from them. The belgian esters may just hide any that are created since there won't be as much reproduction of the yeast.

You basic problem goes back to either the recipe or the mash, i.e. too much crystal malt or too high a mash temp. For big beers I normally mash at around 147° - 148° F. Incrementally adding sugar is good practice. Tyson Arp at Nebraska Brewing has done a bunch of experimentation with late sugar additions. He found that the best time for a sugar addition would be right at high krausen while there is still a little yeast reproduction going on. The formation of new yeast cells in an environment with a different sugar composition than the original wort will allow that new yeast to better digest the newly introduced sugar. Once you do the first batch of sugar at high krausen, the later additions can then be handled by those newer cells.

Wayne

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[Bugeater]

Hmmmm. Should have worked fine. You do have 72% attenuation so far, which is pretty good for most beer yeasts. Oxygenation is about the only thing left that might have been the problem. Go ahead and do the champagne yeast and let us know what happens.

Wayne

[scotchpine]

72% is the bottom of the att. window for 3522. As per Bug's comment, I find that it yealds a more sublte spicyness than the esters from say 3787 or 1388 or 1762 which offer a good bit more fruitiness. Although I have not used it in as strong a beer as you have here.