Bought a growler of Brett, safe?

I lucked out and bought the last growler of an occasionally-available Flanders Red down at the local brewpub today. I'm a little concerned... are there any precautions I should take to avoid contaminating my kitchen with Brett? I don't brew there, but I do fill my starsan buckets inside sometimes.

The dude at the pub seemed to think it'd be fine, but I wanted to get y'all's opinion before I crack this delicious bottle open and let slip the yeast of war.

I can't imagine it would hurt anything. But I've never had a Flanders Red, how is it?

I'd imagine it's quite variable, but the one brewed at the Vermont Pub & Brewery, Spuyten Duyvil, is pretty damn tasty. Sour, but the kind of sour you get from tart cherries... IMO a good thing. Very light body, very strange malt profile. I absolutely recommend you try one, even if it ends up not being your thing.

That's a good question. My brother owns a winery and he got VERY nervous when some buddies brought some brett beers into the employee break room. He has a BS in biochem so I assume he knows what he is talking about. However a guy in my club brews a lot of brett beers and he claims that it no harder to kill than any other wild yeast.

I've gotta imagine that just popping open a growler and pouring into a glass isn't going to do a lot to contaminate your kitchen. Just don't take a paint brush to it and spread it all over the walls and be sure to run them glasses through the dish washer afterwards and you should be fine.

Don't have a dishwasher, but I think it'd be hard to get too messy with this stuff... lovely as it is, a flanders red is not the kind of thing I want to drink enough of in one sitting to get blitzed on. So the possibility of spillage is lower than usual.

At the same time, I may need to make sure I don't drink it in my home office or store the empty growler on the growler shelf... in both cases the proximity to fermenting beer is extreme.

I brew sour, brett, and sacc side-by-side. I've only had one non-controlled infection, and that was the inciting incident for a complete separation of equipment.

You already bring brett and lactobacillus into your kitchen, assuming that you buy grapes and yogurt.

there's brett, lacto, mold spores, bits of hair and dust and every other nasty thing, everywhere. bringing a couple more easy-to-kill yeast over for a visit won't change a thing. brett + starsan, iodophor, etc = dead brett. breweries are paranoid to use brett because they have to clean insides of hoses, clamps, fermenters, etc where bits of hop gunk, old krauzen, or crusty hot break can shelter microbes. not because stuff will jump out of the bottle and run wild. i hope the flanders red is good!

Phunhog said:

That's a good question. My brother owns a winery and he got VERY nervous when some buddies brought some brett beers into the employee break room. He has a BS in biochem so I assume he knows what he is talking about. However a guy in my club brews a lot of brett beers and he claims that it no harder to kill than any other wild yeast.

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I think most wineries don't like Brett cause once the Brett gets into the pores of the wood it will forever infect the wood. Brett will travel deep into the wood forever infecting the barrel. Normal plastic and glass don't have the same problem. The Brett will not jump out of the bottle then into the barrel.

One caution I would take is Brett/wild beers take forever to make. If you get addicted it will be at least a year till ou could drink your own homebrew. You better start brewing them now....

Brett can be cleaned with PBW and star San just like Sacchromyces, it's not some sort of super yeast.

I use the same Better Bottles for clean and funky beers all the time without issue.

Sharing a wood vessel is a completely different issue. Brett beers are poured in brewing environments all the time.

Kerin said:

I lucked out and bought the last growler of an occasionally-available Flanders Red down at the local brewpub today. I'm a little concerned... are there any precautions I should take to avoid contaminating my kitchen with Brett? I don't brew there, but I do fill my starsan buckets inside sometimes.

The dude at the pub seemed to think it'd be fine, but I wanted to get y'all's opinion before I crack this delicious bottle open and let slip the yeast of war.

Click to expand...

Unless you're cooking in some super high tech "clean room" then your kitchen, like everyone else's, is covered in mold spores, pollen, bacteria, and dust that you can't detect. Brett isn't any different. So long as you clean your growler out like you would normally, you shouldn't have any problems.

Thanks, guys. SWMBO and I are about halfway through the growler, and it's been pretty awesome. She keeps furtively asking how hard they are to make... so I guess I know what I need to tool up for.

And FWIW, yeah, it was excellent. I've had this red before, and while I liked it more at the brewpub than I did at home for some reason it's still great. Pretty unbelievable how big and sour they start, and how dry and crackery they finish.