EBY/BBA Brettanomyces Experiment

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All 20 cultures at 4 weeks or so. Few on the left still going. Rest are settling out.

20 bretts all in a row.JPG
 
Was wondering about these pictures - was the ferment slow enough that you had no problems with blowoff? Think you'll get a difference from limited head space?
I did not really have any blowoff with these 1/2 gallon bottles. The airlocks worked fine with no fouling. I did store the 200 ml starters in the frig night before (as to add just yeast slurries) and Bretts do not like the cold drop (I found out later), so maybe they just all went slow and built up over time. Not much experience with Bretts in small fermenters so cannot compare.
 
Are there any early favorites so far? I'm thinking about brewing up another batch and doing a blend of the 3-4 "best" strains. It might be a few weeks yet, as my 001 and a few others formed new pelecules while I was gone for thanksgiving.

I also noticed a few batches have cleared, so I'm planning on bottling them next week.

BTW - how are ya'll bottling these? I don't want to accidentally cross contaminate. I was considering doing a CO2 push through 3/8 copper that I can boil between uses or something similar.
 
Are there any early favorites so far? I'm thinking about brewing up another batch and doing a blend of the 3-4 "best" strains. It might be a few weeks yet, as my 001 and a few others formed new pelecules while I was gone for thanksgiving.

I also noticed a few batches have cleared, so I'm planning on bottling them next week.

BTW - how are ya'll bottling these? I don't want to accidentally cross contaminate. I was considering doing a CO2 push through 3/8 copper that I can boil between uses or something similar.

I plan to bottle soon as well. While I almost always transfer in a CO2 environment, due to the fact that these are small volumes of beer and that brettanomyces is an excellent O2 scavenger, I may just pour straight into bottles to reduce the amount of times I would need to sanitize the same equipment.

Regarding your proposed transfer, you could boil your copper dip tube, but it's really not necessary to sterilize. Sanitizing with Starsan will do the trick. Brett is bound by the same natural laws as all other yeast, and its cell walls will be ruptured by the sanitizer in the same way that sacch will.
 
Glad to see people progressing on this. I won't be able to start my ferments until Feb :(
 
ocluke said:
I plan to bottle soon as well. While I almost always transfer in a CO2 environment, due to the fact that these are small volumes of beer and that brettanomyces is an excellent O2 scavenger, I may just pour straight into bottles to reduce the amount of times I would need to sanitize the same equipment.

Regarding your proposed transfer, you could boil your copper dip tube, but it's really not necessary to sterilize. Sanitizing with Starsan will do the trick. Brett is bound by the same natural laws as all other yeast, and its cell walls will be ruptured by the sanitizer in the same way that sacch will.

So a mini auto-siphon would be safe to use as well? I have no misconceptions about my pouring accuracy - I want to save as much beer as possible!

I'll probably wait until 1/5 to bottle. That'll give my 001 and 002 time to drop out (brand new pelecules formed last weekend) and will be ~ 60 days since pitching.
 
was wondering if anyone has microscoped any of these strains yet? I tried taking pictures of my slides but software failure occurred.
 
I have images of all twenty strains stained with a blue fungal stain. My students also ran PCR (polymerase chain reaction) to ID strains as Brett or Sacc. and two of the strains had double bands (might be two critters). I run a microbiology lab here and turns our students are really interested in the project :). I will post images this weekend sometime (may do a link to a website for images).

Roy Ventullo
 
Can I still participate in this or is it no longer open?

I've just started diving into the all-brett beers and think this would be a great experiment opportunity.
 
Can I still participate in this or is it no longer open?

I've just started diving into the all-brett beers and think this would be a great experiment opportunity.

The experiment is closed. Sad since I started doing small batches and I'll be splitting some to do some brett experiments soon. Oh well.

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Home Brew mobile app
 
I have images of all twenty strains stained with a blue fungal stain. My students also ran PCR (polymerase chain reaction) to ID strains as Brett or Sacc. and two of the strains had double bands (might be two critters). I run a microbiology lab here and turns our students are really interested in the project :). I will post images this weekend sometime (may do a link to a website for images).

Roy Ventullo
As promised, here are microscopic images of the 20 Bretts in a PDF document.

View attachment 20 BRETT IMAGES DOCUMENT.pdf
 
Thanks Roy2Ventullo for posting. It is really interesting to see pseudohyphae formation for strains where I could not observe it. 2/20 strains may be more than one species? Not bad. Really looking forward to see the band patterns. Thanks to you and your students for all the work.

Cheers Sam
 
Has anyone had any kind of "slime" or "sickness" to their batches at all? I noticed a high level of viscosity when pouring in some of my starters... and currently have this problem with another batch I used the yeasts for --> https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f127/slime-beer-sick-phase-448511/

Just wondering. Not trying to change the subject of the thread, but since I used the same yeast... I'll get a photo from my microscope in the next week or so.
 
Has anyone had any kind of "slime" or "sickness" to their batches at all? I noticed a high level of viscosity when pouring in some of my starters... and currently have this problem with another batch I used the yeasts for --> https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f127/slime-beer-sick-phase-448511/

Just wondering. Not trying to change the subject of the thread, but since I used the same yeast... I'll get a photo from my microscope in the next week or so.

I didn't notice any of that. I finally pitched all of mine last night and the only weirdness was that I got no activity from 001 and some mold on 038. I thought the slime/sickness was from pedio, didn't know brett produced that.

EDIT: Just read the the thread and realized you were generalizing and not talking specifically about this project, sorry.
 
I didn't notice any of that. I finally pitched all of mine last night and the only weirdness was that I got no activity from 001 and some mold on 038. I thought the slime/sickness was from pedio, didn't know brett produced that.

EDIT: Just read the the thread and realized you were generalizing and not talking specifically about this project, sorry.

Actually, I think that thread is related - he pitched all 20 strains into a 50 gallon batch. Then again my brain sometimes thinks its 66 instead of 33, so I could be mistaken.

Speaking of, I bottled all 20 strains last weekend. I got 5-6 bottles per batch -17 bottled without sugar and will be tested at a buddies house this Saturday (taste, gravity, etc.). The rest are ready and waiting for the test cycles.

For those of you who noticed the math error, that leaves 3. Like a genius, I put sugar in those PRIOR to trying hydro or tasting. Dumb.

I'll see if we can use his scope rig on the sample dregs as well, but that may have to wait until next time.

For those of you who haven't gotten to bottling yet, plan for a few hours. It takes a while to sanitize everything, fill bottle set, capture the slurry (if you're doing that) close everything up, and move to the next one. This is especially true if you did 20.

I used a mini auto siphon, a gallon jug of fresh sanitizer, and copper tun carb drops.
 
Correct. This is about THESE yeasts, they were all pitched into my barrel (and even some of them when pitching to the original batches were somewhat slimy)

I wonder though if any of the samples (since some were dregs from commercially produced sours) had pedio in them? Just a thought, since mine occurred before pitching to barrel.

I'll probably bottle in the spring.
 
Just put my "at bottling" results in to the EBY google form on Saturday. Was very interesting, but it took a long time to do. I definitely recommend doing it with friends if you have a large number of samples.

Also recommend not taking the capping month 1 sample approach that I described unless you're going to do sampling within 24-48 hours. My results indicate some of these are slow fermenters, and they didn't attenuate as well as others. Clearly they're still going though, because those are the bottles that carbonated.

Flattening a sample is a pain.
 
Some images from BBA/EBY Brett Experiment: 1/2 gallon fermenters, tasting and bottling the 20 Bretts. Followed recipe as statedper experiment. Did tasting with 4 friends but my bad, have not yet posted results (darn day job). We are 5 weeks post bottling and think of doing round 2 soon.

Microdoc

6 FERMENTERS BEFORE BOTTLING TEXT.jpg


BRETTS 001 011 BOTTLED text.jpg


010 AND 011 COMPARED CLOSE UP text.jpg


20131230_163248.jpg
 
Some images from BBA/EBY Brett Experiment: 1/2 gallon fermenters, tasting and bottling the 20 Bretts. Followed recipe as statedper experiment. Did tasting with 4 friends but my bad, have not yet posted results (darn day job). We are 5 weeks post bottling and think of doing round 2 soon.

Microdoc

Thanks for sharing. Looks like your 11 still had a lot of suspended yeast, while 10 had mostly settled out.
 
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