Comparing Fermaid-O and Goferm

Fermaid-O and GoFerm are very interchangeable products. To analyse potential replacements and interchangability, we’ve analysed the content of both.

Content analysis

These are the datasheets of the two products Fermaid-O: https://products.lallemandwine.com/…/25-specification…

Go-Ferm: https://products.lallemandwine.com/…/28-specification…

Both contain the same amount of the following:

Yeast autolysate organic nitrogen content
Yeast autolysate amino acid content

Which is to be expected.

However the difference sits here: Specific inactivated yeast organic nitrogen content

These are comparable to “boiled bread yeast”, however this would not benefit rehydrating yeasts at all.

Whats actually in it?

The whole inactivated yeasts mention is nothing more than a labeling trick! Simply because mechanical steps, do not have to be labeled.

What they are most likely doing, is one of the mechanical post-processing options (basically: milling the yeast cells) to free whats inside them, instead of autolysis.

Does it matter?

Which, according to this paper, leads to better breakdown of nutrient components in the yeast cells:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9998214/

This is, however, a slightly more expensive option for processing. It stands to reason that the manufacturer wants to use as much of the cheaper autolysate as possible, and only add a small amount of mechanically processed yeast cells to increase the nutrient availability.

TL;DR / Conclusion

GoFerm contains an extra amount of crushed yeast cells that are slightly more accessible to living yeast.

This also leads to another interesting conclusion: GoFerm can very well be used throughout the whole brewing process. Mechanically “crushed” yeast cells and autolysate are basically interchangeable — it’s just that autolysate is cheaper to produce.

A product like Vitaferm Bio, more often used in the EU, might be a good substitute to both Goferm and Fermaid-o. As it only consist of milled inactivated yeast cells.

Note on the testing data of GoFerm

The GoFerm datasheet includes a graph promoting GoFerm. It’s important to note that they mostly compare “rehydrating with nutrients” vs “not rehydrating with nutrients”. It doesn’t actually compare GoFerm against rehydrating with any other product that provides available nutrients from decomposed yeast cells.

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