Cote des Blancs
Slow and fruit-forward, and it stops relatively early, which is a virtue when you want an off-dry cider or a fruit wine that keeps some sweetness without being stabilised.
Alcohol tolerance
14%
10% - 14%
Temperature
12-25 C
12C - 25C
Highest must it will finish
24 Brix
about 1.103, giving 13.4 to 14.6% if it went all the way
Nitrogen demand
Medium
Fine on grape must; feed a fruit or honey must in stages.
Sold as
Red Star Cote des Blancs
Lalvin CB
An affiliate search link, scoped to this strain rather than to a guessed listing.
Where it belongs
- Cider
- Fruit wine
- Off-dry whites
Pitching it
Rehydrate properly rather than sprinkling dry yeast on cold must, and plan the nutrient before you pitch: staged additions over the first third of the fermentation, not one dose at the start.
Recipes on this site that use it
Other fruit, mead and cider strains
71B for fruit
14%The same malic-eating strain listed under whites, and the single most useful yeast for country wine, because almost every fruit that is not a grape is too acidic.
D47 for mead
15%The default mead yeast, for the body its lees contribute. Keep it below 20C: run it warm and it makes fusel alcohol that takes a year to fade.
English Cider Yeast
12%Ferments cider dry while keeping the apple aroma that a wine strain strips out, and leaves a fuller body than Champagne yeast does.
Wild ferment
12%No pitch at all: the yeast on the fruit does the work. Slower, less predictable and more complex, and the reason traditional cider tastes like nothing a packet produces.