Effects of over-pitching Brett B in secondary?

[sweetcell]

are there any negative impacts of pitching a lot of brett into secondary?

i recently brett'ed a saison and i pitched a jar of brett that i had been growing for a while. i have no idea what the cell count was, but it was a lot. something between 100 and 200 ml of slurry plus some of the liquid that was sitting on top... several dozen billion cells if not hundreds. a whole vial of White Labs brett typically contains a hundred million cells, so my pitch was 3 to 5 orders of magnitude higher.

it's my understanding that brett doesn't create flavors during reproduction, so unlike sacch i'm thinking it's OK to have over-pitched. brett in secondary creates its signature flavors by transforming sacch's wastes (according to Chad Yacobson) so more cells just means that they'll get to work faster and might require less time to work their magic.

thoughts?

 

[BrasseurGeorges]

Yeah, the way he puts it is that brett's metabolism is not dependent on fermentation, or something to that effect. Idea being it's going to get in there and do what it's going to do regardless. I'm not sure pitching rate is critical in secondary, but tend to think people pitch low as a practical matter. I suppose you could say one being cost, but probably the more important point is that brett tends to stay in suspension. So unless I'm using it as the primary strain, I'd probably pitch low as well. All conjecture/opinion, no facts, but I think this is a good question. Will be interesting to see how it turns out.

 

[Calder]

I'd be interested in hearing your results.

It is my understanding that the anaerobic reproduction of the yeast stresses it, and that somehow plays into the flavors it eventually produces.

Not really sure anyone knows what goes on with Brett as a secondary yeast.

If you pitch too much, it might just sit there and do nothing.

 

[Wernerherzog]

any results sweet cell? I've maybe stupidly pitched two full ECY vials (naard and brux) into the secondary of a 4.45% ABV saison, currently sitting at 1.005 (WLP565), roughly 5 gallons. I'm worried that there may not be enough sugar for them at this point to warrant the high pitch. I'm going to be adding 12 lbs of strawberries and some rhubarb in a few days, which I imagine will supplement the sugar quite a bit, so maybe that will help?