Mosaic Pale (Vermont Yeast)

A few months back I was kindly sent a sample of Vermont Ale yeast by a fellow brewer (Cheers Timmi!) and was keen to try it in a big hoppy ale. For those that aren’t familiar with this yeast it is reputed to be the yeast strain used in ‘Heady Topper’ one of the commercial American beers that helped start the trend for juicy hazy New England IPAs (NEIPAs), now I am not particularly excited by this style of beer for various reasons but I am excited about yeast strains that enhance the fruity flavours from hops and bring their own specific flavour profiles and from what I had heard about Vermont it is a real ‘character’ yeast in this sense.

So I decided to try it in pretty simple Pale Ale recipe with a big dose of Mosaic hops, their big tropical flavours and aroma seemed a natural fit for the Vermont not to mention the fact that they are featured heavily in many NEIPA recipes that use this yeast. I wasn’t interested in trying to create haze or anything like that so steered clear of any use of wheat or oats and started with a pretty standard mix of pale malt and crystals totalling about 7% of the grist. I had read that Vermont likes a bit of sugar in the grist to help it attenuate fully so I added a small amount of Dextrose and finally on a bit of a whim decided to chuck in a little Biscuit Malt to hopefully add a bit of depth to the malt bill so it might have some chance of being noticed underneath the big flavour of Mosaic. The final recipe came out as follows, as you may have noticed it also includes some Falconers Flight in the dry hop, this wasn’t originally in the recipe but when I weighed out the dry hops I realised some of the Mosaic I thought I had was AWOL so I subbed in some FF. This was a quick experimental brew so I was also using the 30 minute mash and boil method so I could get the batch done quickly.

Batch size: 10 Litres (Stovetop BIAB 30/30 Method)
Brewhouse efficiency: 70%
OG: 1.052
FG: 1.009
IBUs: 37
EBC: 14.6
ABV: 5.8%

MALT/GRAIN BILL

2 kg Pale Malt
0.1 kg Biscuit Malt
0.1 kg CaraHell
0.06 kg Crystal 60L

0.08 kg Dextrose (Added at 10 minute in boil)

HOPS & ADDITIONS SCHEDULE

5g Apollo at 30 minutes
10g Mosaic at 10 minutes
15g Mosaic at 5 minutes
15g Mosaic at 0 minutes

20g Falconers Flight Dry Hop 3 days
17g Mosaic Dry Hop 3 days

YEAST

Vermont Ale

Mash at 67c

Ferment at 20c

The result well it is probably one of the best beers I have made, hop flavour and aroma was fruitier than anything I have done before and the Mosaic was absolutely screaming out of the glass! Now Mosaic will make a great pale ale with most yeasts but the Vermont compliments it so well and really brought out the Mango character in this hop, the yeast has a lovely soft fruity ester character which really emphasises the ‘juicy’ qualities of a hop like Mosaic, I’m looking forward to using it with other ‘tropical’ hops like Galaxy etc. Vermont is definitely a unique strain and in my opinion you cant really substitute it and get a similar result, I highly recommend you try it out.

1 Comment on “Mosaic Pale (Vermont Yeast)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.