At the 2011 Music City Brew-Off in November, Rebel Brewer served up four beers brewed using their new proprietary house ale yeast created in conjunction with White Labs.

If you’re a homebrewer looking for a versatile house yeast to use for your ales, a new candidate has arrived and it has a Nashville tie. Popular liquid yeast manufacturer White Labs and homebrew supply shop Rebel Brewer have collaborated to produce a yeast strain called Rebel Brewer American Pub Ale Yeast (WLP250).

If you’re not familiar with Rebel Brewer, it’s an online retailer with a warehouse and showroom located 20 minutes north of downtown Nashville in Goodlettsville, Tenn. Longtime homebrewer and brewing instructor Tom Gentry opened the business in January 2009, and it’s grown to offer a somewhat overwhelming selection of yeast strains (more than 120), malt types (over 170) and hop varieties (75-plus). Gentry and his staff have offered house-branded items before—like dual-temperature controllers and malt mills—but the Rebel Brewer American Pub Ale Yeast is the first foray into proprietary brewer’s yeast.

“That was a several month process, working with White Labs on that and working with their lab people—just finding the characteristics we were looking for,” Gentry says, standing in his store’s showroom. “[White Labs] brewed batches in Denver. They brewed batches in San Diego. Of course, we brewed a bunch here. So it was well tested.”

I’ve yet to use this Rebel Brewer yeast, but I plan to do so this weekend. (Gentry provided me with a vial of the yeast so I can share my results and thoughts on the blog.) The yeast has been for sale on RebelBrewer.com for three weeks, but Gentry and operations manager/avid homebrewer Tyler Crowell have been brewing with the yeast and distributing samples to a handful of homebrewers in middle Tennessee to compile feedback. Regional homebrewers attending the Music City Brew-Off homebrew event on the first Saturday in November were also able to sample four beers brewed with WLP250 that were on tap at Rebel Brewer’s table—a rye IPA, a robust porter, a green chile blonde and an American pale ale.

“I did a pale ale [using the Rebel Brewer yeast], which is probably one of my favorite pales ales I’ve ever made,” Crowell says. “A real simple recipe, it wasn’t anything too crazy. But I really liked what the Rebel yeast did. It probably attenuates about 75 percent or so. It’ll attenuate down pretty good but it will stop and leave some [body] behind. We wanted something to kind of be a good house yeast. We didn’t want another real clean yeast, you know, [like White Labs' WLP001 California Ale Yeast]. I think there’s enough of that out there.”

With WLP250, Rebel Brewer owner Tom Gentry and operations manager Tyler Crowell were looking to create a yeast with a relatively clean profile yet enough character to make it an ideal house yeast.

So-called “clean” yeasts simply ferment wort into beer without imparting any flavors in the process, allowing the combination of hops and malts to be the focus. Other yeasts, notably Belgian strains, are famous for putting their unique stamp on a finished beer. According to Gentry, Crowell and the feedback they’ve received, the Rebel Brewer yeast lands closer to the clean side of the spectrum while still adding some character to the beer. That’s what they were shooting for when they embarked on the process.

“We wanted to mimic the brewpub flavor,” Gentry says, “where typically a brewpub beer is going to have some body to it and not be thin. The yeast definitely does that and it performed well on every style we threw at it.”

Crowell offers a more specific impression of the yeast’s flavor profile when discussing a pale ale experiment he recently conducted.

“I did a 15 gallon batch,” he says. “I did 10 gallons with the Rebel yeast and I did 5 with Wyeast’s Northwest Ale, which is a good yeast. I like that yeast a lot. I figured it’d be similar to what we were going for, like a good character yeast but clean, American.

“I kind of did a side-by-side. They were both really good beers. The Rebel yeast had a little more body to it. I really liked however you want to describe that yeast flavor. Everybody says ‘fruity,’ but I think that’s a little generic of a response. It was like a soft kind of a fruity, almost like a soft breadiness to it.”

“And that can be adjusted by your fermentation temperature as well,” Gentry adds. “The beers that were fermented cooler had less of the characteristic. The warmer ones had a little more fruit to it.”

“The [beer fermented with the] Northwest from that same batch,” Crowell continues, “I’d say [it and the one fermented with Rebel yeast] had a similar flavor but [the Northwest] was a little drier. It had attenuated a little more. I definitely preferred the Rebel.”

Crowell, who harvested the Rebel Brewer yeast after fermentation of the first batch and used it in successive batches, contends that the strain produced better results with each iteration. As with any yeast, homebrewers who use this procedure are advised to start with a new vial/pack of a strain after four or five repeated generations, to avoid off-flavors or unexpected results from possible yeast mutation.

Related posts:

1. Homebrewer, Heal Thyself: The Wort Stability Test
2. New Brewer Pronunciation Cheat Sheet
3. Music City Brewer’s Festival 2010: A Quick Look Back