Question about Brett.

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fineexampl

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About 3 weeks ago i brewed a Juniper Ale. After 1 week i racked to secondary and it's been there since the 7th of this month. I have this fermenting in 2 vessels. One has a "dry juniper" added. The second had nothing so i added dregs from a bottle of Mikkeller Yeast Series: Brettanomyces this evening.

Can i expect anything from this? Was this useless? Will i have a variance in flavor? I kind of did this on a whim so any advice is helpful. It's only a 1.5gal test batch anyway so if i ruined it, i don't mind. I was set to bottle this weekend if my FG was okay. Should i give it another week or more?

Thoughts?

PS - i did very little reading aside from on this forum so all help is appreciated.
 
The Brett will likely give you a little funk, most likely in a good or at least interesting way. The strain you have will determine what this is - it could vary from tartness to barnyard.

One thing you definitely want to account for is that Brett takes a loooooooong time to work. It can ferment a lot of the sugars that Saccharomyces can't process, and it takes a long time to do it. 6 months would be the very earliest that I would even consider bottling this. A year would be safer. Anything earlier carries a risk of bottle bombs.
 
I'm doing a hoppless olde ale with yarrow, mug wort, heather, sweet gale, and juniper berries, henry the 8th ingredients.

I did a primary with us05 for 2 months. racked off to glass & added a brett blend culture... I'm at 7+ months... had a nice thin blue bubbly "infection". it's starting to dissipate. I'm also getting a thicker trub, so I'm thinking the brett is starting to drop out. I may let it go a few more months and then bottle when top looks clean may crack one at new years I may add a fresh washed yeast to carb the priming dme.

thoughts? final abv should be around 12-13% do I need fresh yeast to carb?


looking forward to a barnyard with lots of herbal goodness. just don't want bottle bombs if I try to bottle condidition (want low carbonation 3/4 cup of dme)

brett is not a fast worker took several months to see the "bloom"
 
Hmm, i may have jumped the gun here. For a larger batch i'd be all in. What if i cold crash this Brett. portion for a week or two prior to bottling to try and terminate any activity? I'll still have viable yeast to carbonate from the larger portion.
 
If you really want to stop it short, the safest thing to do would be to either sterile filter, or use a campden tablet (sodium metabisulfite) to halt the yeast. A cold crash may or may not work; it's a crapshoot. Of course, using the campden for one portion may prevent the yeast in the other part from conditioning once it is blended. You could always cold crash and just be super vigilant about the pressure in the bottles, checking daily to make sure they are not overcarbing.

Starr - for bottle conditioning, it's a gamble as to whether you'll have viable yeast at that point. Most likely, you will not, or at least your conditioning will be a bit iffy. It would be safest to add a bit of a very high alcohol-tolerant strain:

http://www.whitelabs.com/beer/strains_wlp099.html
http://www.wyeastlab.com/rw_yeaststrain_detail.cfm?ID=65
 
Hmm, i may have jumped the gun here. For a larger batch i'd be all in. What if i cold crash this Brett. portion for a week or two prior to bottling to try and terminate any activity? I'll still have viable yeast to carbonate from the larger portion.
hahah it's definitely a long term project. now that you know what you're in for maybe you wanna brew a whole batch and just toss the 1.5 gal in with the rest for bulk aging. it might be good to help give the buggies a jump start since you're growing a brett culture in your experimental beer.

stopping a brett fermenation is increasingly difficult. cambden will not really work. potassium sorbate will not work. a combination of the bunch as described below might work but i've yet to try it. here's a thread where there's some conversation about killing wild yeasts to keep the beer sweet: https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f127/bottling-blended-sours-136650/index2.html

This is the way Ive had success

1. Chill beer down to ~32F (knocks down yeast and stops most all active metabolism)
2. Fine (further removes suspended yeast/bacteria)
3. Rack
4. Add campden tablets (knocks down remaining yeast/kills bacteria)
5. Add K-sorbate (inhibits active metabolism by disruption proteins involved http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC277315/pdf/jbacter00437-0161.pdf)
Additionally at the low pH most sour beers are at, adding k-sorbate is particularily effective because a majority of it will be present in the form of sorbic acid (the reactive species)

After adding the K-sorbate you can only bottle off a keg, even if you add sacch (which is far more suseptible to inhibition by sorbic acid) nothing will happen


I have talked with Mike aka Oldsock about using campden, and tried it myself after he did it on a brett stout, I blended a very sour batch that I followed steps 1-4 on, with a very malty brown beer, bottled as normal and a good 3gal is still in my cellar, luckily the carbonation has not changed at all

Im not saying this is a definitive way to do it, but in several of the batches Ive done, its worked without a hitch
 
Luckily i still have 1gal not innoculated. What i straight bottle the extra half gallon as/is and drank it right away?
 
stopping brett isnt as difficult as it sounds in this thread, the "recipe" of mine that jessup reposted was for a sour beer like a lambic that has lots bacteria etc in there

brett can be a slow worker but it wont really superattenuate without the pedio etc, just sacch + brett and it doesnt do much, sure it will get funky and sure the gravity will drop, but not that much, do you know where the gravity was when you added the dregs? what is the gravity now? and what is the gravity of the "clean" batch?

If you really want to blend them, I would add campden, rack following day and blend away, and you shouldnt have a problem

edit - I misread your first post, I thought it had been in the primary 7mos not since the 7th, I would wait at least 1.5-2mos before you try to campden and bottle, otherwise the brett wont have added much character yet
 
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