Dry or liquid yeasts

In the world of brewing I think there are two ends of the spectrum.  There is the Charlie Papizan, relax, have a home brew end, and on the other side is the more scientific, Dave Miller kind of approach.  I think most of us fall somewhere along the spectrum rather than pinned at one end.  I am always interested in learning more, but I am not a scientist.  I have learned a lot just by doing, and then if I am curious, I will go back and try and find out why things turned out the way they did.  I can write down my brews and copy the recipe if I want to make it again, but I find it better to know why things work the way they do.

With wines things can take longer and thus I forget more about what I did when I brewed if I have not written it down somewhere.  In a lot of brewing beer people use liquid yeasts and starters to ensure there is a strong fermentation.  I have read, and found it to be true, that with dry yeasts it is not good to use a starter.  Most wine is fermented using dry yeast.  If you google around you can read about the different processes of getting the yeasts to you, and as I have learned the process of making dry yeast is not as clean and thus any replication (making starters) can amplify (like a copy machine) any imperfections.  When using dry yeasts I have always seen better results using no starter, but a good dose of yeast nutrient.

I prefer liquid yeasts but for wines, there doesn't seem to be as much variety in the liquid category.  Do you have a favorite yeast, or do you use wild yeasts when fermenting, let me know in the comments.

Retaining your head

 I am still (can you believe it?) not done with my brew from last Winter.  You can see the post of that recipe here:
http://kitchenbrewery.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-winters-tale-i-have-read-that-more.html

I've noticed over time that the bottles have very low carbonation and the head fizzes out very quickly.  The other day I was thinking it may be due to my method of sanitizing bottles.  I used to use a funnel and fill each bottle with sanatizer for 15 minutes.  I would do about 10 bottles at a time so it was a long process.  To speed things up I have been putting the bottles in my dishwasher and letting the hot water sanitize the bottles. Then I was thinking, maybe there is some small trace of the soap or the rinse agent that is causing issues. 

 I posed a question on the forums at Norther brewer.  you can check it out here if you want:
http://forum.northernbrewer.com/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=120632&p=1054398#p1054398

I can't be 100% sure, but I do know this never happened to me before I started sanitizing bottles in the dish washer so I'm done with that going forward.  

 The other thing I've learned that I was wondering about is the stronger ABV and the long time I aged the beer in the secondary.  I wanted to make sure I got as much ABV as I could and I let the yeast go until it was completely done.  I remember thinking, ' I hope there is enough left in the yeast to bottle condition ' and I think that may also have played a part in this.  The strain I used was not quite alcohol tolerant enough to ferment all the sugars in this beer and I think it reached its limit before I bottled.  For beers like this I'm planning on adding more yeast to the batch when I add the priming sugar from now on.  

Using a strain that is more tolerant of higher alcohol

 levels sounds like a good idea too.  I'm thinking maybe one of White Labs California strains:

  http://www.whitelabs.com/yeast/wlp090-san-diego-super-yeast

http://www.whitelabs.com/yeast/wlp001-california-ale-yeast?s=homebrew