Comment on Is wine active enough to cultivate and use as a yeast?
whaleross@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I think that wine yeasts are basically refined strains of the common bread yeast, saccharomyces cerevisiae. Actually a lot of traditional recipes for alcoholic beverages call for bread yeast, like beetroot sherry for example, because that’s what regular people had access to in the olden days.
j4k3@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Interesting. I thought bread yeast was limited to ~10% abv. Am I missing something or misinformed?
whaleross@lemmy.world 5 months ago
It probably varies, but in principle yeah. Bread yeast main purpose is CO2 production and in winemaking gases are considered a side effect. Hence the refinement into different strains. Still, even 8% homemade wine is better than none.
There are also people doing all kinds of wild ferments with both wine and ciders from whatever yeasts happen to be in the air and battle it out and become dominant. Sort of you never know what you’ll end up with. I don’t know much about it but it seems like fun.
kosmoz@lemm.ee 5 months ago
I once made a batch of mead using literally bread yeast and it ate up all the sugars finishing at around 16% ABV. It didn’t taste good though …