WLP540 Abbey IV Ale Yeast (Seasonal - July/August) - White Labs Yeast

Like other reviewers I found this yeast to give a nice moderate fruitiness but have trouble getting it to finish. It needs a lot of help to finish out well. I have found that a bit of an oversized starter helped me to get the numbers I expected. Has worked a lot better for me after rinsing and reusing it in another beer.

Love the esters, but if you don't have a healthy starter with a good cell count you will never get the gravity down. I used this with 500 on a 1.097 triple & and crashed the gravity to 1.020 in 4 days @ 64?F. Make sure you have a healty starter, sevromicyes & goferm. Use fermade k at the pitch with good oxygen.

A group of guys from my homebrew club used this yeast to brew a Belgian Dark Strong for a barrel project. I tried to build up my yeast with a nice low gravity Belgian Pale Ale, but the beer only fermented down to 1.034 from 1.050 over a month. We had the same issue with our Dark Strong, all of the beers fermented this yeast finished around 1.034. The flavors of the yeast were great, a nice estery and phenolic flavor. We fermented 10 gallons with WLP530 Abbey Ale and it fermented all the way to 1.013.

Overall the yeast leaves a nice Belgian character, but is difficult to get it to finish dry.

I bought this yeast for my Belgian Pale ale recipe and it started very quickly and had an 80% apparent attenuation with an awesome fruity nose.