Yet another accidental wild brew....

I have the 11-11-11 Old ale sitting in my Ferm closet. I've done about four brews now since that in the 10g Corny keg I use as a primary. I did not get any contaminated brews until this Tripel I am about to bottle. I know for sure there's wild yeast in there since I dipped a sterile cotton swab just to the surface then swabbed a wild yeast testing media. Sure enough white colonies (what I suspect is brett B) formed over the weekend. This might not be a bad thing to have a funky tripel at 10%abv I just wasn't planning on it.

What yeast did you use? 9097 has Brett in it.

WLP545. I know the 9097 has Brett thats what pushed me to do a lins cupric sulfate plate streak. The testing media only allows non-sacch wild yeasts to grow.

Any idea where the Brett B would have come from?

I'm pretty sure the 9097 has brett b in the pack. So somehow I got it to go from one ferm to another.

Well it was well over a week and a half since I did my yeast test. I had taken gravity 4 weeks ago and again today. Nothing changed and when I heated it up again nothing really happened besides it cleared up more.

So based on what I've read about Belgian yeast and some history of Belgian brewing I may have been given a false positive. I do know some of the wild yeast testing media can allow for certain belgian yeasts to grow and I believe that was the case with my beer.

Anyhow I went ahead and bottled in heavier belgian bottles then took two 750s and four 375s as special projects. I marked a spot off on a pipette and shook up my mason jar with RR Temptation Bret. I gave each bottle a dose and corked them. I will open the first one around year one from bottling.

I did the infecting thing (using some Avery 15 Brett) with a few bottles of Golden Strong last year doing a drop of starter slurry per bottle. It turned into one of the best beers I've made and I wish I'd done half the batch that way.

Barc said:

I did the infecting thing (using some Avery 15 Brett) with a few bottles of Golden Strong last year doing a drop of starter slurry per bottle. It turned into one of the best beers I've made and I wish I'd done half the batch that way.

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This is interesting, what was in the starter? did you do any more prep before bottling? Add any priming sugar, etc?

On the tripel I just bottled I added priming sugar as I bottled rest of the batch normal. I was torn whether to first fill the bottles destined for brett with no priming sugar and then brett them allowing the brett to just use up some of the sugars left. Then I figured I'd rather have them rather highly carbonated so I did priming sugar for the whole batch. The bottles I threw the brett in were the heaviest champagne and belgina bottles I have because they will be carbonated well past the sub-3 volumes I primed for with the non-brett bottles. Like I said I wanted to just do a experiment and may start dosing a bit of each batch this way. The way I look at it Orval just doses with brett at bottling so why can't I for a little added complexity.

i'll be curious to see what happens with this - i'm racking off a couple of gallons of tripel that is fermenting now and will be pitching brett c (and house bugs) into it this weekend... figured why not. keep us posted.

COLObrewer said:

This is interesting, what was in the starter? did you do any more prep before bottling? Add any priming sugar, etc?

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Prep was normal. Priming sugar, etc. I added the drops to a bottles that were heavier, i.e. Trappist, Duvel, etc.

The low fg (1.003) meant that there wasn't a heckuva lot for the Brett to eat anyway but I figured it should be enough to give it an interesting note or 2. And I was correct!

If I do it again, which I plan to, I will probably do half a batch normally adding half the priming sugar and the other batch I will cut the priming sugar by maybe 1/4 assuming my FG is that low again and then add the Brett directly do each bottle again. The dropper of slurry really seemed to do the trick so I'm happy with that and the carbonation is just a hair over what I wanted.

I'm fully planning on doing the same thing with my saison that I just brewed on Friday. When it comes bottling time I will hit half with JP critters via pipette method.