Pitching a new beer onto previous Brett ferment?

[mikeburns]

I currently have a brett saison finishing up (been on the yeast and brett for 2.5 months). I am wanting to try out an Orval clone and figure I could brew it with regular trappist yeast and then either put that beer onto the yeast cake of the brett saison or introduce some of the brett saison beer to it in order to introduce Brett for the Orval clone.

Which approach is the better choice? The brett saison has all the trub from the kettle in there and obviously has yeast which has begun to autolysise over this time (which the Brett is working on). Would it be better to just add a litre of the brett saison beer to the orval clone? Will there be enough Brett in that or would I need to add more? Or should I just not worry about all the yeast and hop debris that has been at the bottom of my fermenter for the last 3 months and just dump the orval clone on top of it all?

Thanks for any advice on this one. First time using Brett so kind of new to it all.

 

[radwizard]

I would brew your Trappist Ale with Sac and let it ferment out. Once your primary is done, I would rack your Saison and leave behind a little beer. Then I collect a little beer/slurry and inoculate your Trappist. I would also consider adding a different strain of Brett with your slurry addition, just to keep your culture evolving and becoming more complex. You could do this with bottle dregs from Orval or Boulevard, or just add a new commercial vial. That's what I would do. Your current Saison is just a scaled up version of the bottle dreg method.

The other consideration is how much head space do you have on the Trappist, and how long you want to age it. If you are planning on longer term aging, I would consider topping off your Trappist with the Saison. That way you are inoculating it and eliminating headspace. I don't know how much head space you have, so It would depend on that. If you are going to use co2 to purge out the o2, or going to be doing a shorter aging period, It should be Ok with a little headspace. Food for thought....

You can pitch your Brett on to the Trappist cake or rack the Trappist to a new Carboy. Either way it should turn out well with the Brett in there.

Just some opinions. Good luck on the beers!

 

[mikeburns]

Thanks very much radwizard! Thats pretty much what I was after.