Verdant Blonde IPA

I have seen a lot of press recently about Verdant IPA Yeast from Lallemand, so I thought I would give it a whirl. It is fairly easy to get hold of. I got mine from the Malt Miller.

We have been brewing a lot of Deanhouse Blonde recently and it doesn’t seem to hang around long! On the basis that we can’t brew enough, it looks like it might make a good test beer with this yeast. Given that we have brewed it multiple times, we have something that we can compare it too.

I normally use Fermentis US-05 in the Deanhouse Blonde. It seems to be very reliable and leaves a clean, neutral taste to the beer. The Verdant IPA yeast seems to behave in a very similar way. I pitched it dry straight from the packet. It took about 24 hours to get going and was complete in a week. My target FG was 1.007 and it came in at 1.006. Fairly normal for this brew.

Once fermentation completed, I cooled it to around 3C for 48 hours. This results in a much clearer beer. It was then racked and 180g of brewers sugar added for secondary fermentation – I normally add around 8g of sugar/L.

The picture below shows what it looks like straight after bottling. I leave the bottles at 20C for a week and then put them in the cellar (around 12C) for another 2 weeks.

With US-05, this beer will normally clear within 48 hours leaving a light dusting of sediment in the bottom of the bottle. It will be interesting to see what happens with the Verdant IPA yeast.

UPDATE: I made a mistake when conditioning this brew and left the bottles in sunlight – and I mean bright sunlight! For the best part of a week! This isn’t good for this type of hoppy beer and it quickly went off – it discoloured and lost it’s taste. We managed to drink 2-3 bottles before this happen – enough to encourage us to brew it again – but the rest of the batch went down the drain! It is covered here.