Effect of primary sach strain on brett activity

[corwin3083]

I brewed a sour blonde using ECY Bugfarm a while back; it's been in bottles for a little under a month now, and is currently the most underwhelming beer I've ever made. It's sour, but that's it. There's no brett flavor or aroma. There's barely any malt flavor left, due to an FG of 1.000. It's just mediocre.

Since the Bugfarm was almost six months old, I added a pack of US-05 at the 72-hour mark, when fermentation still hadn't really taken off. However, based on the reading I've done since then, I'm starting to suspect that this yeast choice was a mistake, since brett apparently produces a lot of its flavors using esters created by the primary yeast strain. If accurate, this would account of the utter lack of complexity in this beer, since a clean yeast strain by definition wouldn't produce any (or very few) esters for the brett to work with.

So, two questions:

1) Is this theory at all likely or even reasonable?

2) If I leave some of this beer to age, is there a reasonable chance that it will become more interesting? I'll be brewing another batch of this with recultured yeast in the meantime, but if there's little chance of the first batch becoming worthwhile, I'll drink it or blend it or something and be done with it rather than let it take up space.

 

[ryanhope]

Are you saying the starter vial of BugFarm was 6 months old when you pitched it? Maybe you should have done an un-stirred starter. There are a few strains of non-brett yeast in BugFarm so there should have been esters for the brett to work on. Brett character will also develop in the bottle so maybe check it again in a few months and see what it tastes like.