Blending 2 yeasts for the 1st time, will 1 over power?

[CarbonTom]

Per the suggestion of a local brewery in attempt to clone one of their beers, I was told to do a blend of saison and belg wit yeast. I bought WLP566 Saison II and WLP400 Belgian wit.

My OG is only 1.062, but I am shooting for a FG of 1.007 and I usually make starters. How can I tell if one will be dominant? Should I not do a starter with a blend? Should I make 2 different starters? Or should I just throw both tubes in on brew day and let it do its thing?

Thanks!

 

[davejanssen]

Good questions. I imagine that the character of one could easily dominate if you blend 50/50, and if you were going to grow them up on a stirplate and weren't going for 50/50 I would do 2 starters. If you are shooting for a 50/50 blend then either pitching the two vials straight in (which depending on batch size would probably be underpitching by a bit but could be close enough) or doing a starter with the two together would probably be fine. You will likely get differential growth but you probably won't need a huge starter because you probably won't need to grow a lot of cells. Did the brewery give you any guidelines about the proportion of each yeast? If not, do you think they would if you asked them?

I do a lot of yeast blending with saison yeasts and I think the blend ratio is important here. In brief, here is how I usually do it:

I grow up the yeasts I am blending individually on stirplates and pour the slurry off into mason jars of known cell counts. On brew day I figure out how many cells I need from Mr. Malty and come up with an appropriate blend based on the general blend ratio I'm shooting for and what I have in the fridge. I usually lean heavily on one of the saison strains and use the other for more minor flavor contribution and ensuring complete reliable fermentation.

Here is a more detailed run down of what I do:

http://horscategoriebrewing.blogspot.ca/2014/09/yeast-growing-and-blending.html

 

[CarbonTom]

Dave,

Thank you for your informative and helpful response. I appreciate it. I will see if they can give me a ratio to work with. I was assuming it was 50/50. Its a Belgian IPA so I feel like being right down the middle would be the best bet. Excellent blog post by the way.