Re-pitching Cake/Dregs from Brett Secondary

[Microphobik]

Hi all,

I recently brewed my first Brett beer, which was a Belgian Pale Ale with WLP510 that I then added Brett Brux to in secondary. I'm interested in making more Brett beers, even 100% Brett beers.

I'm in New Zealand where I pay $20 per vial so re-pitching sounds a lot nicer than buying a new vial each time. Especially because I do a lot of small batch brewing.

My question is this... I obviously will have the Sacch strain in the cake as well. Will the Brett out-compete it or will whatever beer I add this to end up picking up some of the Belgian phenolics from the wlp510? Does harvesting the Brett from this cake only make sense if I plan to use it in a secondary of another Belgian beer? Just wondering what most people do in this situation and/or what problems or benefits I might be overlooking.

Thanks.

 

[secondbase]

The shift towards a majority brett population will happen over time. With subsequent pitches, you'll have more brett than sacch but the first re-pitch should yield a decent amount of sacch character before the brett character overwhelms everything else.

 

[Microphobik]

The shift towards a majority brett population will happen over time. With subsequent pitches, you'll have more brett than sacch but the first re-pitch should yield a decent amount of sacch character before the brett character overwhelms everything else.

Ok, thanks. Good to know.

 

[TAK]

As secondbase says, there will be a shift towards the Brett over time. If you take a pretty fresh cake from the secondary, it'll have a fair amount if Sacc in addition to the Brett you pitched. If you feed it right away, since Sacc has a quicker growth phase, it's my opinion that you'll probably grow the Sacc in stonger proportion than the Brett. However, Brett will retain it's viability better than the Sacc. So, if you can take the cake and let it sit for several months, then feed it, you'll be growing the Brett more than the Sacc. Over a few iterations, hopefully you'll have a good Brett culture with just some trace proportion of the Sacc. That's just my $0.02.

 

[sweetcell]

next time you obtain a vial of pure brett, reserve a little for growing up. that way you'll know you have a pure culture.

what i would do with that secondary cake is once you rack off of it, put some in a small container (maybe a 750 ml with an airlock in it?), and fill up with a 1.040'ish "wort" made with 100% malto-dextrine. brett can live of the MD, sacch can't. in 6 months you'll have very little viable sacch left. won't be perfect, tho, and the longer you wait the less sacch you'll have.