Growing a Brett Starter – questions

The dregs you want to pitch contain sacc. It won't be a 100% brett beer. However, the starter will ferment a whole batch of beer.

 

I've mixed dregs in a starter to supplement a pure pitch with good results. I haven't used 100% dregs to make a beer.

 

Back in March I did a 12 gallons of a basic saison that I split across 3 different yeasts (dupont dregs, wicked weed bretticent dregs and saisonstein's monster). The dupont and saisonstein are very similar, the bretticent is obviously different, but there are no obvious brett characteristics to that beer. I think that the sacc did its thing and the brett was working at the same time and somehow the magic ended up lost.

I have pitched Orval dregs along with sacc and gotten obvious brett flavors, but I have never stepped up Orval and just used that in a beer.

Moral of the story, I think it depends on the beer and the dregs, but there are no guarantees.

 

The other thing you need to consider is if the dregs contain sacc killer strains. This isn't as important for a secondary fermentation, but it is somewhat important for a primary fermentation. If all the ale sacc gets killed, the beer is mostly fermented with the killer wine strain and brett. That can still produce a good result.

 

I've stepped up dregs for a few different beers, Crooked Stave, Wicked Weed, etc. I start low gravity and low volume and usually only use one bottle. I give it a couple of days, you probably wont notice the first fermentation because it will be quick. Then I step it up to a normal starter and give it about a week when working with Brett. As others have pointed out a lot of those beers will contain sacc strains and potential wine yeast or bacterial. Also if you're blending Brett strains, make sure you think the character of all of them together will work well, don't just add them all together because they're all Brett.

 

I just started a wild dreg harvesting project. Based on advice from the guy at my lhbs I bought a bunch of 8 oz mason jars at Target. I brewed a tiny batch of low gravity wort, filled each jar about half way (4 oz of wort), sealed them up and cooled them off. They sit in my cabinet and whenever I drink a sour with dregs I want I just crack open a new jar of wort, dump the dregs in, close the lid partially but enough so the starter can "burp", and slap on a label. I have noticed visible signs of fermentation in the form of a layer of bubbles on top of the starter. Next step is to step up by doubling the size, all the way up to about a 1L starter.

 

I seem to remember reading (no idea where) that a good rule of thumb is a week per step for brett. So you start with 50ml -> 100ml -> 250-500ml -> 1000ml or 4 steps or roughly 1 month. I suspect you don't need to go the full week towards the last step since you should have plenty of yeast by then.

I don't have it in front of me, but i'm pretty sure @OldSock's book mentions harvesting dregs. One of the best $13 beer books you can find, highly recommend it if you don't have it already.

 

Do you have a stir plate?

 

Sure, it's possible to do without a stir plate. A lot longer is likely an understatement. The book Wild Brews says it takes brett three months to double in a traditional fermentation. A stir plate reduces this to a couple weeks.

 

Swirling will speed it up some. My best guess is it will still need 1-2 month steps and at least four steps.

My advice is to buy a commercially prepared brett blend with a lot more cells than a bottle of dregs for your first 100% brett beer. Omega Labs makes a 12 brett blend with 150 billion cells. You can make a 100% brett beer with one starter or less.

 

One disclaimer:

The 150 billion cell claim came straight from my LHBS and we all know the LHBS is never wrong about beer.

@lshaner can tell us how many cells the brett bomb OYL-218 contains.

 

Good on @Brew_Betty for mentioning a stir plate, that assumption was embedded in my earlier post.

A good side project would be first build a simple stirplate and then start harvesting dregs

 

Shouldn't take nearly that long with a pure culture on a stir-plate. Chad Yakobson found peak cell density (12-16X growth) at around a week for the strains he tested. Growing up White Labs tubes (~2.5 billion cells) for primary usually takes me ~10 days (six days for the first step, four for the second).