Sourdough Bread with Heady Topper and Hill Farmstead Yeast

I recently spent a week in Vermont with some cheese monger friends. We went up there as a sort of reunion/vacation and to visit the birthplaces of some of our favorite cheeses. Once all our planes had landed, Eddie (yup, that Eddie) had a stroke of brilliance and checked the weather. There was a warning out for a big winter snow storm. We drove out to our cabin and found it already covered in snow - and more was falling. What happens when five dude cheese mongers/craft beer enthusiasts get snowed into a cabin together? Most of it we agreed never to speak of... but what I can share are the grand tales of overindulgence. We overindulged.

Anyway, we decided to start saving the yeast sediment from some of the funky beers we drank to use as a sourdough starter. Sediment from the following was included: Yazoo Deux Rouges, HF Biere de Norma, and Heady Topper, just to name a few. The funky dregs all went into a mason jar, along with a small ball of dough and some maple syrup to get the bugs all active again.  A couple of days in, the little culture was very active so we busted out the flower and got to work. We wrote the final bread recipe down on a journal page which may or may not have included drawings of our souls and of a shrine which may or may not have been built to hold the dough while it rose. We were snowed in.

Ultimately we just weighed the liquid yeast and subtracted its weight from the weight of hot water to be added to the flour. We let the dough rise for about 10 hours, before leaving it in the fridge overnight and kneading then baking it the following evening. As delicious as it was with some Vermont Creamery Maple Butter, it wasn't as sour as I was hoping it would be. 

Brett-ing Bottles of Yazoo's Hefeweizen

I've always loved the hefeweizen made by my hometown brewery Yazoo. But lately every time I have one I try to imagine it with a little Brett character. It's already nice and yeasty, plenty of banana and a little clove. It's just what a hefeweizen should be, but adding some barnyard funk to that mix sounds divine. I'm fairly certain it's the only year-round offering from Yazoo that is bottle conditioned, which makes me want to play around with propagating that yeast and blending in some Brett for a funky batch of homebrew.

Just for funsies I thought it would be interesting to dose a few bottles, or a six pack, of Yazoo's Hefe with some Brett, recap the bottles, and see how they taste a couple months later. The downfall to this experiment is that they are likely to over-carbonate. Seeing as they're already carbonated and the Brett will go to town munching on residual sugars and dextrins I'll just be keeping these somewhere they can explode without killing any humans or carpets, just in case.

I've got a couple liquid Brett cultures on hand to use for this, first being CMY001. I also happen to have some ECY 20 (Bug County) on a stir plate from a recent brew, propagated up from the last little bit I didn't rinse from the vial. Now, I know what you're all thinking. "The blend ratio! It'll be way off! The bacteria grow faster!" Phooey I say! Firstly, it's February in my house right now. And it feels like it. On a fast stir plate with lots of oxygen in solution at 40 degrees, I'd bet my 3-tier that the Bretts are slowly chuggin along and the bacteria are doing nothing at all. Besides, if I'm wrong I've only lost about 8 ounces of starter wort and a six pack of Hefe. Plus it could be interesting to see what the LAB contribute over the course of the year.

So I went to town adding 7-10 drops of CMY001 or ECY20 to a couple sixers of Hefe. I recapped each bottle with some old Brewer's Best caps that have been laying around since my days of brewing extract kits, labeled the six packs and tucked them away in the laundry room (which has a cement floor - just in case.) I'll be sure to update this post with tasting notes when I finally crack into these.

----UPDATES----

- 4/23/14 - round about a month later the CMY bottles have all developed the world's smallest pellicles at the liquid surface inside the bottles! Obviously when I popped the caps on these bottles to add the drops of Brett, the blanket of CO2 escaped from inside the bottle and was replaced by oxygen. The ability of Brettanomyces to scavenge oxygen free radicals is what makes it such a champion at helping beers to age properly. Although it continues to slowly ferment dextrins and increase dryness and sometimes over carbonate an aging beer, it is scavenging and utilizing oxygen to do all that. Reactive oxygen species can cause several flavor stability issues, most obviously the oxidation of ethanol to acetaldehyde, which has recently caused me to drain pour several bottles from my cellar. The formation of pellicles at the liquid surface occurs, in part, due to a larger concentration of oxygen in the air space above the liquid than dissolved within the liquid itself and helps to protect an aging/souring beer from oxidation.

CMY001

To cultivate this yeast, I was obligated to drink two delicious 100% Brett Beers from Crooked Stave. Hop Savant and St. Bretta are both fermented only with Brettanomyces, although I have seen an email circulating from Crooked Stave confirming that depending on the batch of St. Bretta, there may also be some Lacto present. Bottles were refrigerated upright for a week or so after shipping, allowed to come to room temp, opened, bottle openings were wiped with an alcohol swab to sanitize, beer was poured into glass carefully to keep sediment in bottle. A small amount of diluted starter wort (~1.020) was added to the bottles, strongly swirled, and poured into a sanitized flask to be placed on a stir plate.

Once this culture had grown large enough most of it was used to ferment the Small Fetus beer. I transferred the last 4 ounces of it to a tiny sanitized mason jar, plated it on PCA + KAM (antibiotics), and have the jar and plate banked in my beer/yeast fridge. In retrospect, I wish I didn't have to use a plate with antibiotics in the media. I'll have to plate again if I want to find out whether or not there's Lacto in that culture, but I'm currently subject to using whatever extra plates are available in the campus lab and haven't had the luxury of time to start making my own. But a boy can dream.

Only one colony morphology is seen across the entire plate, not unlike that which was exhibited by the same strain when Chad Yakobson plated it on MYPG agar.

WLP 650 Brettanomyces bruxellensis

This culture was streaked onto a PCA + KAM agar plate directly from the WLP 650 vial. Uniform colony morphology, all forming the same wrinkly brain shape that this strain also formed when plated on WLN agar pictured on the Brettanomyces Project page. However, a purple coloration is developed.