Safale Battle: S-04 vs. US-05

The showdown!

I have made several beers with both Fermentis Safale S-04 (English Ale) and US-05 (American Ale).  Typically, the type of beer style matches with the choice of yeast because it will produce appropriate qualities to the beer type.  English yeast will attenuate less, leaving a higher final gravity for a more malt-focused beer and American yeast will attenuate more, resulting in a lower final gravity for a dryer beer.

In the spirit of experimentation, I wanted to compare the characteristics attributable to the Safale S-04 and US-05 yeast strains in the same wort.  This would also give me a chance to try out some 10 gallon batches on my system.  I split the grains into two mashes and combined the wort from them, boiled for the hour, then cooled it with an immersion chiller.  I split the wort into two 5 gallon class carboy fermenters, and pitched the American strain in one and the English strain in the other.

I have done this with the last two batches of homebrew, using two of my most established recipes.

• Citra IPA with OG of 1.058
• Amber Ale with OG of 1.050

Both of these are currently still in the carboys, but I am already noticing big differences in the yeast characteristics.  These were both originally American Pale Ale/IPA styles, but I am hypothesizing that the use of the English yeast will push those versions into the English IPA and English Pale Ale/Extra Special Bitter (ESB) style.  Two brew days will ultimately result in 200 bottles of 4 different types of beer!

I will post the findings of my experiment, focusing on these attributes:

• Color - big differences, including a "color swap" during fermentation
• Attenuation - comparison of the final gravities
• Flocculation - how did the yeast drop out of the beer?
• Fermentation activity - English was way faster and had a much larger Krausen
• etc.

I should be bottling the IPA in about a week and the Amber about a week after that.  I will share the results at a later date.

English on the left and American on the right.

American on the left and English on the right.