Brewing Contemporary Styles with

Kveik Yeast
The speed and temperature flexibility of kveik yeasts make them attractive to
commercial brewers, and many, like Daniel Cady of Mikkeller San Diego have
begun experimenting with them across a range of styles beyond just
“farmhouse” ales.

DANIEL CADY Jun 12, 2019 - 8 min read

Kveik yeast had been on our radar thanks to some of the early reports
brewers were offering in regards to turnaround, fast fermentation, and low
ester and phenol profiles. We toyed with the idea a bit and finally got our
hands dirty in September 2018 when Sean Buchan of Cerebral Brewing
(Denver, Colorado) joined us for a collab. We riffed off our standard IPA recipe
and built a pretty cool hops bill that we thought would play off of the Omega
Hornindal Kveik yeast. None of us had used it before, so we were shooting in
the dark.

Our pitch rates were pretty standard—we didn’t want to go too short—and we
kept the oxygen in the wort pretty standard. We wanted to use it as a baseline
to judge how this new (to us) yeast would perform in our cellar. We’ve brewed
with California Ale yeast and English Ale yeast for years and have a very good
idea of how they will perform but had no track record with impacts of
temperature and other factors on how the kveik yeast would perform.

Once fermentation started rolling, it took only 4 hours for us to see the gravity
drop. We were just floored at that point. One of the important advantages of
these yeasts is the warm temperature range they ferment at, and we wanted
to explore that, so we knocked out the wort at 80°F (27°C). It was freaky
seeing that going through the system, but we let it ride, and we set the
temperature jackets on the tank at 95°F (35°C) so it wouldn’t get too crazy, but
by the next day it was already at 95°F (35°C) and had fermented 10°P (1.040
SG) from the starting gravity in just 12 hours. It finally hit terminal gravity at
5°P (1.019 SG), so it was pretty predictable using our IPA recipe as a base.

The flavors that we got were really cool—tasting beer out of the tank at 90°F
(32°C) is really strange. You’re not too sure what you’re totally getting, but
right away we were getting intense tropical notes—resinous funky pineapple,
sweeter mango/papaya, and a really interesting citrus profile that reminded us
of Grand Marnier liqueur with some sweetness behind a brandy note. That
was right before dry hopping, so we were skeptical about whether that
intensity would remain, but once we dry hopped with a blend of Citra and El
Dorado, it started to marry with those tropical and citrus notes. The beer was
out of the tank in 14 days—a little faster than our standard tank residency for
IPA, but to be able to get through fermentation and into dry hopping that
quickly was exciting. We didn’t experiment with dry hopping during active
fermentation, as we weren’t sure how the high temperature would affect it and
wanted to isolate the yeast as a variable first. Once it hit terminal, we chilled
the tank to a comfortable 70°F (21°C) and got our dry hop going.
ADVERTISEMENT

It proceeded as usual from there, as we observed the turbidity and

sedimentation in the tank. We got a pretty healthy yeast harvest off of it, which
surprised us as anecdotal reports from brewers using other strains were all
over the place in regards to flocculation. We hard-crashed the tank and got a
decent amount of yeast off it.

Looking at a glass of it now, 4 1/2 months later, I’d describe it as a moderate

haze with a bright orange body and light-to-medium turbidity, but it’s not the
milky quality that some consumers expect. Flavor-wise, the beer is wildly
different now than when fresh. Around the brewery, we shared a similar
sentiment—drinking it fresh, doing forced diacetyl tests, and having it on taste
panel, none of us knew what we were getting into.

Trying to describe what this IPA tasted like put everybody to the test. It took a
month to 6 weeks after it was canned and on draft for it to really come
together and pull out the tropical and citrus character we found in the
fermentor where some of the bright grassy character from the dry hop had
faded a bit.

Coming back to it now, it shows a touch of age, but that slight liqueur brandy
note is lingering on the nose. It has a strange green note—okra or
asparagus—and I’m not certain whether that’s a reflection of the hopping or
how the yeast is transforming. We used the yeast a second time in a
completely different beer and saw that orange liqueur character as a jumping-
off point for something different—a winter warmer–style spice ale inspired by
mulled wine.

There’s a Scandinavian mulled wine with a similar spicing profile as standard

American mulled wine but with almonds and cherries in it as well. So we built
a fruited spiced winter warmer around the orange character and gave it some
holiday spices and tart cherries and grape must, then fermented at 90°F
(32°C), and sure enough, that orange liqueur character came back.

We used that as a test of attenuation as well to see what the alcohol tolerance
of the yeast would do. That beer ended up finishing at 11.5 percent ABV, but
with no fusel alcohol on the nose, and it wasn’t hot on the palate, even after
ripping through such a warm fermentation. It took a similar amount of time to
really settle in to itself. After about a month in the tank lagering, it started to
meld, and even now drinking it 3 months later, it has some alcohol sweetness,
and you get the spice character, but the interplay between the fermentation
and the fruit is really cool.

We’ve scheduled another IPA batch upcoming, using the same recipe and
same fermentation schedule as the first, but changing up the hops a little bit to
see what that does. Ultimately what we’re hoping for is R&D for future
releases and a possible larger production scale-up. We’ll see if the market is
ready for easily accessible IPAs fermented with a Norwegian farmhouse
yeast.

Exploring the temperature range is going to be key with these yeasts. As far
as building a flavor profile around fermentation, there’s still a lot of ground for
us to cover to know and have expectation of how they will perform. By brewing
IPAs with kveik, we’ve almost taken what we’ve learned in the past few years
of having the yeast available and jumped 100 steps down the road. Now I
suspect we’ll take some steps back and explore its versatility in other styles.