Difference between Active Dry, and Brewers yeast

If you're talking about the 'dry active yeast' being bread yeast, yes it has a yeasty taste. Most wine yeasts have little yeast taste. Gene

Some yeast will tend to leave a bit more "yeasty taste" than others. Bread yeast will tend to do this. Generally, this fades over time

But the implication that some yeast "leads to more alcohol content" is wrong. Yeast digest sugars into alcohol and CO2. A given amount of sugar will be digested into roughly 55% alcohol (by weight, I believe). So 20 lbs of sugar will yield about 11 lbs alcohol when fully fermented. I don't believe there is any significant variation in this between different yeast varieties.

It is true that some yeast have a higher tolerance for alcohol than others. Beer or bread yeast may essentially be paralyzed when the alcohol concentration reaches 6% to 8% alcohol. Wine yeast can normally tolerate at least 12% to 14% alcohol, and the hardier varieties (with a little help) will get to 18% or so.

So if you use a low alcohol tolerant yeast, you may have trouble getting all the sugars converted to alcohol. But the potential alcohol depends only on the amount of sugars, not on the yeast used.

Doug

Thank you for the answer. Just out of curiosity, what is the upper limit to the content in fermented wines? I have seen some ports that were fairly high in %, or are those special blended?

Tim

Port is a fortified wine; the high ABV comes from the addition of a distilled spirit.

But the theoretical limit for a non-fortified wine is actually higher than the typical 20% of port, since there are yeasts that can reach