Boo! Your thread title made me think you had vials all packed up to ship out. I should have some on the way from a yeast trade. Excited to try it out.
i received my vial today. hurray for Love2Brew. Booo-urns for $30 shipping for 1 vial to Canada. fuuuu..... made a starter and we'll see how it turns out. will probably just do a real pretty blonde.
I have some on a stir plate and was surprised by the smell. Much funkier than I thought. Just brewed an all Brett Trois IPA last weekend, not sure what to brew with ECY04
there definitely was some funk in the vial that i got. i don't expect that to come out in the stirplate. if all else fails: brew a blonde. otherwise, curious about how it will work in a dubel. not sure if it will be amazing or revolting.
No Brett, Blends, Sours, or Funky strains I have had from ECY ever turned out anything but amazing. I am sure this blend will work great for you.
When I saw the ECY04, first thing I thought of was a Mimosa clone. I don't have a giant stirplate, so maybe something smaller first to build up the cell count.
i haven't had mine on a stirplate (usually don't for brett), but it's been crazy active whenever i shake it up a bit. i've never used claussenii but this starter smells tropical with a lot of funk. pretty excited to use it!
yeah, i debate about it for brett. brett on its own: i believe that it helps. otherwise, i'd put 2 weeks aside for a starter.
yeah i've done it before, but usually got some sacc starters needing the stir plate so i just let the brett go. i'm not too worried about it bc chad yakobson said thats what he'd do and also it lets me gauge the growth better. do you all find that brett goes through 2 growth phases when making starters? it's super weird but i find that for most of my starters, so i like being able to know when that second one is done for sure. generally takes sometime between 1-2 weeks to finish up.
all of my brett-only beer usually take twice as long as my sacc beer to finish fermenting. like, my brett blondes can bubble away for a month or more (depending on my mash temp). the 1-2 week number for brett starters: depends. depends what you want. i just added some starter to my Cantillon Iris strain on Tuesday and it was fermenting yesterday (not violently) and the pellicle had reformed (doesn't necessarily say much, but i always take the pellicle as a sign of healthy cell count). i'm using the Cantillon strain for a beer that i'm brewing tomorrow. i'll wait until saturday or sunday to add the yeast. guess my example is different, because i took over 1 liter of "starter" that i prepared 2 months ago and was sitting in a growler and added another litre of wort to it. so we're not talking about the 10:1 wort:starter ratio that i've seen people talk about. we're talking about doubling the volume and, therefore, not needing an insane yeast growth rate. in fact, i would guess (key word: guess) that if my goal is to have an increase in cell count, i'm good to go tomorrow. my starter gravity was, in theory, around 1.018 when the 1 litre of wort was added to my starter. after 3 days of yeast sex, it has probably dropped closer to 1.010 and the cells are partying like it is 1999. just one other bit of food for thought: when i've used a healthy starter of sacc or brett, they perform the exact same when used in primary. the "problem" with brett is that, when buying it from Wyeast or White labs, you're getting a REALLY low cell count in each vial. that's because they assume that you're using it as a secondary yeast and, therefore, don't need a high cell count. so if i was building a starter with ONE vial of commercial brett yeast, then yes, 1-2 weeks to get an adequate cell count would make sense AND would result in a cleaner starter with a good FG. but i would assume (again, assumption, not logic) that in my example and in the example of using a healthy strain like ECY's brett strains, that you would not need 1-2 weeks to get adequate cell counts for pitching. i'd assume that the 18 hr approximation that one may use with sacc would also apply to brett and a few more days would result in a lower FG but not necessarily a higher cell count. i'd guess that the maximum cell count falls somewhere in days 2-5 when a healthy yeast source is used (ECY yeast, my Cantillon iris starter) and between days 5-10 when a commercial yeast strain is used and a starter is stepped up appropriately. after typing all of this shit, i seriously need a beer. /jonesing.
i don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying, but it doesn't really speak to my 1-2 weeks for a starter comment. i wasn't talking about having enough cells to brew or them being active. i was referring to brett's tendency to go through 2 stages of exponential growth as opposed to sacc's 1 stage of exponential growth (http://www.brettanomycesproject.com...-batch-culture-growth/propagation-discussion/). for that reason, i tend to leave it a bit longer than i would if i were propagating sacc. also, because brett survives better at room temperature anyway, i tend to do what you did and make a starter to get a proper pitch and then just leave it to let it clear up. i'll then decant and add a little starter wort to get them active when i'm ready to brew with it. but i'm not looking for cell growth then, because i already have enough and i'm not getting max growth in a day or so anyway, but i just want the cells in there to wake up and get ready to eat the sugars in the wort.
