BBA/EBY Brett Experiment Update 2

Posted on by

Hello fellow BBA/EBY experiment collaborators. This is the second update concerning the BBA/EBY Brett Experiment. The first update can be found here. Once again thanks to all the participants and all the people offering to send me some unique dregs and yeasts as well. I would like to proceed with some numbers:

  • 36 collaborators are officially in for the experiment (me not included)
  • 347 samples will be sent out for the experiment
  • 9 collaborators will test the entire 20 strains (awesome!)
  • From the 36 collaborators, 1 is not from the US (and it isn’t me). Don’t worry, I only looked up the cities and not the entire addresses 🙂

collaboratormapCan I still sign up for the experiment?

I am sorry to announce that I don’t accept any further collaborators. If you are interested in the strains, please subscribe to https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/eureka-brewing-yeast to get email alerts of future strain releases

Yeast shipping

As previously mentioned, the yeasts will be sent out on Monday, the 26th of August. Please read the first update post what has to be done after you received the yeasts.

First results about the strains

I would like to publish first results about some of the strains

  • EBY001 B. girardin I: The strain which will be released is different from the one I originally isolated. The original strain looked and behaved like normal brewers yeasts and I therefore replaced it with another Girardin Brettanomyces strain I have
  • EBY005 B. cantillon I, EBY008 B. cantillon II, EBY009 B. cantillon III, EBY011 B. cantillon V, EBY013 B. cantillon VII and EBY016 B. lembeek I are really slow growers. Expect to wait longer to get signs of fermentation
  • All strains can form colonies on agar plates. Therefore all strains are viable, even the slow-growing ones

IMG_20130814_201831That’s it from me already. I hope that everyone can revive the yeasts without problem and gets some nice beers out of them. Over and out!

13 thoughts on “BBA/EBY Brett Experiment Update 2”

  1. So looking forward to this. One question, why the no stir plate recommendation for propogating up? Is that for consistency or have you found that brett does not like the extra O2?
    Best
    Anthony

  2. I can’t wait for this, it’s going to be great reading everyones notes on the strains. I wish I had the room to try all 20!

    I like the map, its cool to see where everyone is located at. Alot of people in the North East portion of the US, I would have guessed there were more West Coasters especially with Jeff involved.

  3. As I haven’t saved any brett before how do I do so if I want to keep it alive for other recipes or just “play around” with it after this is over…..any instructions available anywhere if it is possible without having to set up a chemistry lab!!! Thanks

      • Brett strains are pretty easy to keep alive. Remember that some of these strains that Sam isolated were from some seriously old beer that had pretty low cell counts to start with.
        I just keep mine in vials with beer they were brewed with. I have found no need to keep feeding them and have had good success with viability after over a year in storage.

          • Well thanks for the reply and above all that it is really GOOD news about keeping Brett alive and well….going to make this an even more thrilling ride since we can take this in any directions we choose after the first round is over and evaluated…..will check out the link…have read his site a lot and don’t know why I haven’t stumbled into that before….regards

    • Well, you are on the right side of the globe here 🙂 I only know a couple of European homebrewers pursuing the sour dream. I have to mention, most of them are from the US and life and brew in Switzerland. Luckily for me, I will meet them next Sunday for a beer tasting & trading again. Can’t wait to talk sour again.

        • Exactly. On the other hand, sour brewing heavily depends on the English language. I don’t know of any serious source covering the basis of sour brewing in lets say German. In English on the other hand, there are tons of blogs, books, articles about the topic. I guess this is a major reason why a lot of non-English speaking people are not into sour brewing (yet).

          • I think availability and cost are big obstacles, too.

            I know in Brazil until very recently you couldn’t really even get Brett or bacteria (or liquid yeast at all for that matter), so if you wanted to brew “wild” it was with bottle dregs from a very expensive imported beer or totally spontaneous fermentation, or nothing. I suppose also with brewing ingredients costing at least 2x what they are in the US people are less likely to risk a bad batch. As one example, 1 lb. of pale malt from one supplier there is about US$2.50 without shipping. I don’t know how that compares to Europe.

            Multiple attempts at Googling for sour beer homebrewing in Portuguese have yielded nothing, despite very active communities on homebrewing in general. On the other hand, there’s a blog with a whole lot of info on lambic called O Cru e o Maltado (“The Raw and the Malted”) but it’s more just writing about producers and the methods, not on brewing it at home. At least he mentioned that you could probably brew a totally “wild” beer in Brazil instead of repeating the old Senne river valley myth. Maybe someday someone will take that up.

Comments are closed.