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.