Intro To Brett Saison

[trav77]

Hard to find funky saisons where I live so I thought I'd try my hand at fermenting with Brett. It will be a pitch onto WLP565 saison yeast cake.

Question for the Brett portion of the fermentation: would I be best pitching at start of primary or pitching when racking to secondary?

I was thinking of WLP650 or maybe WLP644. Any need to make a starter?

It will be a pretty straightforward saison. 75% pils, maybe 25% wheat rye oats or some combination. Looking for something that still has the typical saison yeast phenolics but with a bit of funk playing a background role.

 

[m00ps]

Ive found that if you pitch the brett with the sacch yeast, the brett character will develop quicker. You dont really need a secondary

Using a starter also helps. Especially with the tiny cell counts in white labs vials. It will eventually develop brett flavors at nearly any pitch rate but I like doing a small starter about half the size of my sacch one

 

[secondbase]

Depending on how much brett character you'd like, co-pitching gets the quickest brett character. Adding it in secondary will take longer. With time, the brett will completely take over and the phenolics of the original saison yeast will be gone.

As you may know wlp644 isn't brett but instead a wild saccharomyces. If a mild, fruity brett character is desired I would recommend Brett C. For classic barnyard, definitely go with Brux. Wyeast Lambicus is my favorite brett from the two macrolabs.

 

[trav77]

Sounds good. Yes I do know that 644 was reclassified as saccharomyces. Looks like a few batches are in order. One with sacch saison yeast only then one with 644 and one with 650. Ultimately I'd like to get toward some sort of house Brett mix but step one will be to try them out independently.

Sounds like copitching will work well.