Yeast

Note Profile

Botanical

About

The smell of baker's and brewer's yeast. It is a fermentation smell, not a plant smell. The note sits between bread and beer and is funkier than either.

Scent Profile

Boozy leads and it is the alcohol of fermentation, not of a spirit. Two sources reach for it independently: ScienceDirect calls yeast estery and alcoholic, and a baking source calls active dough pleasantly beery. Earthy is the faintly musty smell of dry yeast before water touches it. Sour is acetic and lactic acid, named by ScienceDirect for degraded yeast and ranked third of seven aroma profiles in a GC-MS and sensory study of yeast protein. Animalic is sweat. Isovaleric acid was the single most intense profile in that same study, and ScienceDirect adds hexanoic, octanoic and decanoic acids, which smell goaty. Nutty is the bready, grainy side, supported by rice bran ranking second in the study and by bread-like appearing in the baking sources. Sulphurous is hydrogen sulphide and methanethiol. Fruity is the esters, ethyl hexanoate in particular. Below those sit coffee_cacao for the roasty pyrazine, aldehydic for acetaldehyde, sweet_vanillic for a trace of vanillin that the study ranked last of seven, smoky and warm_spice for the guaiacol and 4-vinyl guaiacol phenols, and a small floral from phenyl alcohol.

ScentWheel

Breadthbroad

EnvelopeHeart · ~5h lasting

Family Sweet & Gourmand, Woody & Earthy, Fruity, Amber · Musk · Leather

Read off the wheel, not a label applied to the note.

Origin

Yeast is a single-celled fungus, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. It is not a plant, but `truffle`, `mushroom`, `lichen` and `seaweed` are all typed botanical here, so the convention covers harvested organisms rather than Plantae strictly. There is no yeast oil. No supplier or fragrance house material naming a yeast base was found, so the note is a reconstruction and the evidence behind this vector is food science and brewing literature rather than perfumery trade sources. The material has two states and they smell different. At rest, ScienceDirect calls good brewers' yeast a neutral odour, slightly estery and alcoholic with a B-vitamin character, and a baking source calls dry yeast faintly musty and earthy. Once it ferments, the same baking source has it turn beer-like and bread-like, then distinctly yeasty and alcoholic. This vector scores the active state, because that is the smell the word yeast names.

Usage in Perfumery

No fragrance house or supplier document describing how perfumers dose a yeast note was found. What can be said is what the sources support. The note is a funk, not a base, and it is dosed for the fermented edge rather than for volume. The sulphurous and sweaty facets cross from character into fault at low concentration, so the working range is narrow. Reach for it where a composition wants bread dough or a brewery floor rather than a clean gourmand.