Driving Quality and Innovation in the Homebrew Community

There is nothing more satisfying than that first pint of your freshly made homebrew. No matter if you’ve been brewing for decades or if you’ve just caught the bug, the thoughtfulness and care you put into each batch is of utmost importance. You share your creations with friends at celebrations and reveal the play-by-play of what inspired the style, to the painstaking efforts you took to make it. Pro-brewers do this every day in their work; consistency, quality, and innovation are the hallmarks of their success.

At Lallemand Brewing, we firmly believe that homebrewers deserve the same high-quality product as our pro-brewers. To ensure the highest quality product, we package our 11g homebrew sachets under vacuum just as we do for our 500g commercial bricks. Storing the dry yeast under vacuum ensures no contact with oxygen or moisture, which would decrease viability over time. While nitrogen flushed packages perform the same function, in principle, small leaks in the package are impossible to detect and can allow moisture and oxygen to degrade the contents. With a vacuum-sealed pack, any leaks result in a loss of vacuum or visible ‘soft-pack,’ and we recommend not to use it.

Just as homebrewers deserve the same quality yeast as commercial brewers, we also believe that homebrewers have just as much to teach us as commercial brewers. Typically, we ask commercial brewers to participate in trials at their brewery for each new strain that we release. Doing so allows us to collect important fermentation performance data from various recipes and use different equipment. Recognizing that homebrewers also have tremendous brewing expertise and profound creativity, we took a different approach this year with the simultaneous release of WildBrew Philly Sour and LalBrew Verdant IPA to both audiences.

For each strain, we not only provided yeast to commercial breweries but included local homebrewing clubs for organized trials of these new strains. The MontreAlers, a club based out of Montreal, and Kahnawake Brewing Company worked with the Verdant IPA strain (see the survey, below). The VanBrewers in British Columbia paired up with Parallel 49 Brewing Company for a Philly Sour trial.

We followed up with an online discussion where homebrewers and commercial brewers shared their experience with these strains. Homebrewers brought a lot of value to this discussion as they are better able to brew many different beer styles to showcase each strain’s versatility. Discussions were highly informative and lively. Both the pro-brewers and homebrewers came away with a better understanding of these strains’ real-life applications, all while sharing a pint of homebrew, of course!