The easiest way to change your beer around, is by changing your east. Our blog has quite a few post on yeast in general, so to save your eyes consider this post as a directory to useful information.
When looking at your beer recipe one thing that you need to consider is if it is a lager or an ale. Lagers are bottom fermenting so they like to ferment at cooler temps (around 55F) while ale’s are top fermenting and they ferment at higher temps (room temp).
If you wanted to brew a lager but you can only do ale’s because of your set up, I would recommend you do a little research on the yeast that might work for you. Normally it will come down to 029, 036 or 060. These yeast strains are fairly clean leaving what I call, “A faux lager” taste. They are more crisp.
The biggest thing with yeast is to choose a style of yeast that compliments the style of beer you are making, try to keep it to the region. Usually there is not just one style of yeast that works for your beer but several, especially when it comes to liquid yeast. We do have a yeast chart for white labs that has the descriptions of the yeast.
When looking at the yeast chart for white labs you will need to consider flocculation as well as attenuation .
If you really don’t want to get into liquid yeast or because you are ordering your yeast over the internet it may make more sense to have dry yeast. Here are some dry yeast descriptions.
Yeast is super subjective on what you want to use but I think that the main points for it are just to be flexible and you can make one recipe and use 3 different yeast on it, and it will taste different every single time.
One way to save money per recipe is to culture your own yeast. We do have a post on how to do it. It’s the way that I was taught on how to do it.
That said it pretty much covers the main points for yeast. The next part is the last part to our series on how to develop your own recipe. We will put everything together and do a few examples of recipes.
Jay's Brewing Blog 
February 22, 2012 at 12:35 pm
Thanks for the tip! I’ve been making my own beer for quite some time. I will start implementing this tip about changing up the amount and style of yeast for my own beer recipes!
February 22, 2012 at 2:27 pm
Glad it could help!