Farmhouse Brewing Supply (http://www.farmhousebrewingsupply.com/gigayeast/) has been carrying GigaYeast for a while now and I was wondering what kind of experiences people have been having with them. In particular, I was wondering if anyone had tried out the Fast Souring Lacto or Sour Saison blend and how fast the souring actually was. But since a LHBS near-ish to me has started carrying GigaYeast I was hoping to get impressions on any and all of their offerings. As soon as I get a chance to brew with some I'll report back here with results.
Please do, I am thinking about doing a sour saison with Belle Saison dry yeast and fast souring lacto pitched together.
My first experience with GigaYeast has not gone very well. On Saturday I used the GigaYeast Sour Saison blend (which I believe is just lactobacillus and saison yeast) and I have no apparent activity. No krausen, no airlock activity, the gravity hadn't budged by Monday night. I was worried about wasting my wort, so I pitched some commercial sour/brett dregs I had been building up. Now some details of the brew. 5.5 gallons, 1.050 OG, 10 calculated IBUs. GigaYeast specifies 200 billion yeast cells in their gold pouches, but after a month+ production date yeastcalculator.com suggested I had 126 billion cells left. I didn't make a starter because I was worried about knocking the lacto/yeast mix out of whack, so I was under-pitching by ~60 billion cells (yeastcalculator again). I pitched at 74 degrees. I had shaken the wort before dropping in the mix. For what it's worth, I didn't much care for the smell when I opened the pouch. I also bought a pouch of their Fast Souring Lacto, so hopefully that goes much more smoothly. I'll hopefully report back details when I use it. Next time, though, I'll have a better back-up solution ready.
I've got a saison going with the Sour Saison Blend now as well. I guess luckily for me it took off without a hitch, although tasting it this weekend at 2 weeks, it didn't really have any sort of acidity. I'm hoping that changes up soon, although my IBUs were a bit high on that (25 or so). I wasn't sure whether their lacto would handle that, as the website doesn't have much of a description on that, and it appears they don't know which strain it actually is. I have the Fast Souring Lacto as well, so I'll have to compare that to WL/WY Brevis once I can order the latter. I need to order more Brett C and Brett Trois, and haven't managed to find a place with all of those things in stock.
IBU: 7 and tried to maintain ~100F and before 72 hours it was nice and lemony tart. Used it in a Gose.
