East Coast Yeast Bug Country

I have a culture buying addiction!

I went to the Monk's Melee at the Hulmeville Inn yesterday. My friend and I popped over into Trenton and stopped at Princeton Homebrew. Lucky for me there were some ECY vials there. I picked up a strong scottish for my future wee heavy brew coming up soon.

The real interesting thing that I grabbed was the ECY20 culture called Bug Country The Mother Bugger. According to the ECY facebook page, here's the cast of characters. "ECY20 BugCounty - The mother bugger for sour ales. Contains ECY01, ECY02, ECY03, ECY04, and ECY05. Also includes: Brettanomyces lambicus, bruxellensis, anomulus, clausenii, custersianus, nanus, and naardenensis. Various Lactobacilli and Pediococci were added to round out this limited release sour blend for 2011."

I just don't know what to make with it! I'm psyched I got such a variety of organisms not offered anywhere else, I just need to brew up a nice dextrinous mash to toss this into I suppose!

Darn you for stealing my vial! Haha. I emailed them yesterday to get one but they were sold out in 3 hours. I would say...if all else fails, sour cherry brown! It's that time of the year. I'm going to be picking up ingredients for my own Big Bad Brett Brown next week.

It was a total by chance purchase. I thought they were out of everything before we even got there.

Yeah, I got an email from the solar home brew group saying they got a bunch of yeast in from ECY. I really wanted to get a couple of them. The brett blend 1 and the farmhouse saison strains are ones I'm very interested in, I think those are 03 and 04. Same day, everything was gone. I guess scarcity creates its own demand.

Wait, Bug Country was already released? Al said it wouldn't be out until Nov/Dec?

I have a bottle. I remembered hearing about it through his facebook, but didn't remember what when I saw the bottle on the shelf.

I was just going to start a thread on this same topic. I've got a single ECY20 coming in the mail but I'm torn as to what beer I'm going to make with it. I was thinking about a Flanders Red-esque grist of some kind and just mashin a couple degrees higher.

I'm leaning towards doing a 1.070ish Oud Bruin using purple maize in place of yellow maize. Additionally I have plans to use bug country in a p-lambic/gueuze with a friend. It will be a 11-12 gal wort split between two fermentors. One will get bugfarm5 and one will get bug country. Then at the six month to one year mark I'll brew up another beer or two to give us three or 4 to blend with for bottling.

Sounds pretty damn awesome. I'm looking into doing a dark Oud Bruin or perhaps an Abbey at some point in the future here. I've already got a decent pipeline going right now with the Old Ale and a Brett C/Dupont/Wild Saison. I gotta do a few more clean beers to give me some wiggle room.

Also there was a bit of a title correction I found out it's Bug County not Country.

Man I'm torn on how to use this vial.

Build a big old starter and split it or save some of it for different beers.

I want to do a cryo prep on this culture before I use it up. That way I can grab an inoculation loop from the vial anytime I want more. Which speaking of, I forgot to bring my wyeast 9097 brett isolated MYPG plate to school to innoculate some malt extract. I might do it today to get a small culture bottle going if not I'll do it monday next week. I got to working with other cultures this week and forgot about this plate in the fridge.

Hey man it's all good. No pressure. I've been culturing bottle dreg brett B and brett C the past few weeks.

statseeker said:

Build a big old starter and split it or save some of it for different beers.

Click to expand...

Thought about that but was wondering if I'd through off any balance that the blend might have at this point if I grow it up too many times.

My bet is that the balance of organisms will not be thrown off by the starter as long as you split it and refrigerate it right away. If you think that would throw it off just think what a cryo'd tube grown up from a innoculation loop would do....