WLP653 or WY5526 (or something else)

[MikeLastort]

I bought a bunch of sour cherries at my local farmers market (12 quarts of them) and all of them are in the freezer, with one goal in mind. I want to make one hell of a lot of "lambic"

I also have a full size oak barrel I'm planning to ferment in. Planning to brew up about 60 total gallons of beer using, turbid mash, etc, and probably using the barrel as primary fermentation.

So I've been doing research into which yeast to use, and I'm down to either White Labs 653 or Wyeast 5526, and I'm leaning more toward the Wyeast.

Has anyone here got a preference for one over the other?

Oh yeah, I'm planning to leave the beer in the barrel for at least a year, and then adding the cherries after that. But that's for another thread.

 

[jfolks]

Those are pure Brett cultures - if you want to make something closer to the lambic style you will need souring bacteria (lacto, pedio) and some clean sach, in addition to the Brett. (Belgians use cool ships to capture wild yeasts/bacteria for lambics, but their barrels add additional microbes - so adding pure cultures is probably a safer bet on the homebrew scale). Nonetheless, you can still make some awesome funky beers with either of those Brett sources. If you want to stick with one of those as your sole source of yeast (and no souring bacteria) use Wyeast (wyeast has about 80 billion cells, white labs has only 2). If you want to stick with 100% Brett, but want to maximize the lambic flavor, use amalgamation from yeast bay

 

[jfolks]

If you pitch pure Brett and there are no souring microbes present in your barrel yet (that is, no sour beers have been through your barrel yet), it will only need a month or so to finish (probably closer to two weeks).

 

[chrilr]

Wyeast Lambic blend will taste pretty good at 2 years old

 

[MikeLastort]

Was thinking of adding some of the Wyeast 3278 after about a year or so. I'll take a look at the Yeast Bay - haven't heard of them before.

Thanks!!