Ohio Brewery News

Three Pitches

It’s an old adage about who does the heavy lifting in the industry, but it’s true: “brewers make wort, yeast makes beer.” The brewer’s job is to give yeast a happy home – the wort – where it can transform sugar into alcohol. In return for providing this life of comfort and abundance, we get beer to enjoy. It’s not symbiotic by the textbook definition, but close enough for our purposes.

Yeast is essential to the beer-making process, but it’s not just a workhorse: different yeasts impart unique flavors, aromas, finishes and other characteristics to a beer. To show off yeast’s contributions to craft beer, three Columbus breweries got together for a little educational collaboration.

Using the same ingredients, Derive Brewing, Forbidden Root and Gemüt Biergarten each brewed an identical rice lager wort, then pitched different varieties of yeast in each batch to get wildly differing results. Gemüt’s version – Once Oryza – uses their trusty German lager yeast strain to produce a crisp beer with light notes of stone fruit. Forbidden Root pitched a specifically developed yeast strain that unlocks thiol compounds during fermentation in their version – Twice Oryza – creating more intense tropical fruit aromas. Derive’s beer – Thrice Oryza – uses a classic Saison yeast, imparting spicy, floral notes bolstered by robust effervescence.

Compare and contrast all three of these brews side by side at the collaboration tapping hosted by Forbidden Root on Tuesday, April 25. Find out more at facebook.com/forbiddenrootcolumbus