If brett's added as a primary or secondary yeast to a beer that has molasses, how much will the brett break down? Molasses is primarily sucrose and lactose. the sucrose will be chewed early into fermentation, but the question I have is: will the brett eventually break down some/most/all of the lactose? will it eliminate the residual sweetness that you get from molasses? any difference in attenuation when molasses is added if brett is used as a primary versus secondary yeast? and i skimmed Chad's paper (http://www.brettanomycesproject.com/dissertation/introduction/ ) as a reference but i didn't see any reference to more-frequently-used brett strains of lambicus and brux.
Molasses is a byproduct of the refining process for beet sugar, cane sugar, and maybe others. I can't imagine that it contains lactose.
Speculation... galactose is a component of raffinose, so maybe that's the cause of confusion. To make it worse, isn't galactose also a component of lactose?
Yep, lactose = glucose and galactose, raffinose = galactose, fructose, glucose, makes sense for confusion. Common sugar nomenclature is confusing enough, don't even get me started on IUPAC.
The sugar breakdown was based on a paper i found where they performed chromatography on molasses samples. i read it at home and can't find the link. all i can find now is this study: http://www.dionex.com/en-us/webdocs/4666-AN92_LPN0565.pdf it doesn't show lactose in the above study. anyways.... getting back to the original question, can we talk about brett breaking down black strap molasses?
This completely drives home the point that lactose is not part of molasses. The authors are using lactose as an internal standard, which is a molecule dosed into a sample to allow relative quantification (e.g. back calculate amount of other sugars in sample by comparing integrated peak intensity of lactose of a known amount/concentration to integrated peak intensity other sugars in sample with unknown concentrations). This is very common for Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry, HPLC, etc., I used to used tetradecane as an internal standard in GC-MS for quantifying oils comprising the hop aroma component profile.
Should ferment it out, if not completely, then to the point of anything left behind being negligeable.
i don't think you understand what i said. the first study i posted had lactose in both the HPLC reading AND in the description of their findings. not trying to be an asshole, but i typed my initial post at 6 AM. the important part of my post was asking about brett and molasses. i don't care all that much if lactose is or isn't in brett. from what i read - whether i posted in error or not - was that lactose was in molasses. so breaking down HPLC, which I'm familiar with from my university years, is appreciated, but not what I'm looking for.
thank you and would this be different if brett was the primary vs secondary? time until completion or final gravity?
Maybe shoot an email to neew belgium. Their peach porch lounger was brewed with molasses and fermented with brett.
I seem to recall reading that Brett will break down all those sugars with time, at least in respect to a secondary fermentation. How long would be a function of cells pitched plus remaining sugars unfermentable by sacc plus brett's overall time frame. So at least several months IMO. If you are using a lot of molasses I would be concerned with the residual unfermentable impurities left behind. Molasses often has small amounts of sulfur and other impurities. I'm not sure what brett would do with those but it may not be pleasant. If the sulfur content is sufficiently high it might come through in the final flavor. The question is too open ended to try to be more specific.
Molasses can be from the first through 3 refining stages. Sulfur is added to some. Blackstrap is the third stage runnings, and has high mineral content, such as iron, and a fair amount of ash. Brett eats through a lot of surer, but not minerals and ash.
