bottling IPA with Brett

[kwantam]

Hello all; I've done some lurking, but this is my first post here.

I'm presently a few days into fermentation on an IIPA (AHS Pliny recipe). I've been considering bottling a small bit of it with Brett.

My plan is to ferment for two weeks, dry hop at 70F for one week, cold crash for one week (with dry hops in place), then bottle. I guess I'd transfer to the bottling bucket and prime it, bottle about 2/3 of it, then pitch some Brett and bottle the rest.

First, is this just a waste? Will the already healthy (albeit dormant from the cold crash) Saccharomyces totally outnumber the newly introduced Brett, eat up the priming sugar quickly, and result in little more than a waste of the yeast?

Second, is there a good chance of producing bottle bombs by this method, since the Brett will metabolize several polysaccharides that the Saccharomyces can't?

An alternative method I'm also considering would be to only rack about 2/3 from the primary for bottling, pitch Brett into the remainder, and let it go until the gravity is once again finalized, then bottling. This would likely take care of issue #2, but I can still see issue #1 being problematic, especially now that this is all happening on top of a Saccharomyces yeast cake. Then again, in this case the Brett will only be eating whatever undigestable polysaccharides remain (plus doing their part once we get to the priming/bottling stage).

Has anyone experimented with something like this, or just given it enough thought to have some more suggestions?

Any and all input is muchly appreciated, and more generally, thanks for the great wealth of info on this forum.

 

[Barc]

Welcome!

I've sort of done what you're referring to but I had a very low FG (1.003). What I did was to add a few drops of Brett starter directly do several bottles just before capping. I wasn't worried about bottle bombs due to the fact that a) my FG was very low and b) I only added Brett and not Pedio or anything else that could potentially take the gravity all the way to 1.000.

Depending on your FG, I'd probably go with your second option, however. You really risk bottle bombs if you leave anything the Brett will chew on but not the Sacc. Even a single point drop can cause headaches (i.e. bombs) or gushers depending on how high you carb it. Adding Brett to a secondary fermentation will allow you to make sure everything is done. An option would be to go until you're about 75% done with fermentation, rack your 1/3 into another container and add Brett to that. That would allow some more Brett flavors to develop.

What I recently did was to do a pure Brett fermentation and a pure Sacc fermentation and then combine in secondary. This allowed the Brett to ferment what little was left behind by the Sacc and then allow me to bottle with no risk of bombs.

From my original experiment with adding Brett directly at bottling I can tell you I wish I had have added it to more. The flavors will absolutely develop in the bottle. I think you'll be happy with the result if you like Brett and IPAs. IMO, Wild Devil is great and they use only Brett to ferment with, or so I'm told.

Hope that helps and good luck!

 

[kwantam]

Thanks for the informative reply!

I think I'll go for a Brett secondary, let it go for a decent time (a couple or three months, maybe), and possibly do a small bit of additional dry hopping before bottling the Brett beer depending how much aroma has been lost.

A couple more questions:

I'm planning to do either Brett B or L; since I'm not feeding it much sugar, might the L, having "stronger" character, be a wiser choice for greater flavor differentiation?

Should I keep it cool (65ish) or let it run at room temp (75ish)? I don't see any temperature guidelines on the White Labs website, and Wyeast says 60-75, which is somewhat less than helpful.

Ahh yes, one more: since Brett packs tend to be a bit low on cell count, I'm assuming I should do a bit of a starter first despite pitching onto a relatively small amount of beer (1L into 1.5gal or so)? I don't know what's considered overpitching for Brett.

 

[Barc]

Three months is overkill. Treat Brett just like Sacc if you're not adding other bugs. I'd say an extra month is probably more than sufficient. I did a 2 week primary and a 2 week secondary then a 1 week dry-hop recently and was pleased. You should lose much less aroma / flavor that way but it will probably have a little less of a Bretty character. With an IPA, there will always be trade-offs between yeast development during bottle conditioning and hop-aroma / flavor, imo, no matter the yeast.

I've not used Brett L but Brett B provides plenty of character with minimal sugar. If I'm reading you right, you're looking to get a Brett background but still have a noticeable IPA up front. If that's the case, B should be fine. And it will be good, imo, to save a few bottles back for a 3 and 6 month tasting. It will be a different beer entirely after a year or so, but in a good way.

I've allowed Brett to ferment at 65 and 75. The lower temperature allowed for a little "smoother" beer, for lack of a better description, but not really so much that most folks would be able to tell the difference. Also, it could have easily been the recipe differences that accounted for my preception. I would say that you should be OK at either temperature but, like most yeasts, the lower the temperature (within range) the lower the risk of off-flavors.

You can make a starter and I would recommend it. I'd give myself at least double the amount of time for a standard Sacc starter just to be safe as most of those, like you say, don't contain nearly as many cells as standard Sacc packs do. Once it gets going, it really ferments out pretty much like Sacc. For 1.5gal, I'd probably do a small starter, maybe even less than 1L, especially if you're already at a lower gravity. Since you're already fermenting, you may not have the option of getting your gravity at 75% of your FG at this point and then pitching the Brett but don't let that stop you. Go ahead and make a quick starter, pitch it onto your small batch in secondary, and let it go for a few weeks. I'd say to take the gravity after 2 weeks and determine if it is finished... It will probably be done in 3 or less and then you can dry-hop.

Just my personal opinion here but you MAY want to do a full Brett fermentation with your 1.5gal (or more) batch in the future. It won't really take any longer than your Sacc fermentation and then you can bottle each of them seperately. If you like what you've got, you can always make more. And, if you want to see what they taste like mixed, you've got a perfect way to do so post fermentation and even do pluses and minuses in your mix to see if you like a lot or a little Brett. No worries about bombs, no worries about secondaries, etc. and you can easily tell the differences and similarities without guessing what's contributing and how... Again, my personal opinion.

 

[kwantam]

Thanks again for the great suggestions, Barc. I'll resurrect this thread when the results are in.