Bootleg Biology: Mad Fermentationist Brett Saison

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DoctorBaconite said:
Newbie brewer here. Last night I used the MF culture in my 4th all-grain batch based on the Siddhartha of Suburbia Saison grain-bill:

12 lb 2-row
0.5 lb carapils
2 lb Munich
1 lb white wheat

I wanted a tarter beer so I dropped it to 4 IBU's, but I wasn't thinking very clearly and aerated the wort and pitched at about 95F, remembering what I had read about hot side aeration afterwards.

I'm hoping the warmer wort gives the lacto a head start, but I'm not really sure what other effects the temperature will have. I know warmer temps can create fusel alcohols and off-flavors, but will the brett be able to help clean those up?
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I wouldn't worry about hot side aeration at all. I've recently been aerating and pitching TYB Voss Kveik at 100F. I would be worried about fusels, though. Did the wort cool on it's own before fermentation took off, or did it just escalate from there? I'm pretty sure brett can't clean up fusels, at least not completely. Let us know how it turns out.
 
I just pulled a sample and took a pH reading. pH is at 4.04.

[Photo](https://i.imgur.com/BnxZpO0.jpg)

The aroma is quite citrusy. Flavor-wise, it's tasting very tart already. It almost tastes like it has lemon juice in it. I'm not tasting any solvent/permanent marker flavors, so hopefully fusels are minimal.

I'm not sure what temp it was at when fermentation started, but when I looked about 7 hours later, it was bubbling vigorously.
 
DoctorBaconite said:
I just pulled a sample and took a pH reading. pH is at 4.04.

[Photo](https://i.imgur.com/BnxZpO0.jpg)

The aroma is quite citrusy. Flavor-wise, it's tasting very tart already. It almost tastes like it has lemon juice in it. I'm not tasting any solvent/permanent marker flavors, so hopefully fusels are minimal.

I'm not sure what temp it was at when fermentation started, but when I looked about 7 hours later, it was bubbling vigorously.
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That's great. I'm not surprised that it's fairly tart. The most recent time I brewed with it, I didn't add any hops at all in the kettle. I let it go a couple days, and then I dry-hopped with 2 ounces of fruity hops to stop the lacto. It ended up quite tart.
 
I'm currently crashing my saison and plan on harvesting some slurry for a 3 way split test: Hopped Wort, Un-hopped Wort, and Lightly Hopped Wort with commercial dregs.

A question about the batch with commercial dregs: Assuming it turns out well, can I simply pull the slurry and reuse it? Or are batches that use dregs one and done?
 
NothingRhymesWithCurtiss said:
I'm currently crashing my saison and plan on harvesting some slurry for a 3 way split test: Hopped Wort, Un-hopped Wort, and Lightly Hopped Wort with commercial dregs.

A question about the batch with commercial dregs: Assuming it turns out well, can I simply pull the slurry and reuse it? Or are batches that use dregs one and done?
Click to expand...
 
Finally getting around to using this yeast for the first time:

Dark Saison 2019 AKA Dark Dickon Cherries

8lb Pilsner malt
3lb munich
3lb white wheat
.5lb special B

Mash-in at 131 for 15 min, raise to 148 and hold for an hour.

Boil, 60 minutes
1oz low AA hop @ 60
1 tsp Superfood nute @15
Spice Blend @ 15 (4g Coriander Seed + 2g Sweet Orange Peel + 2g Grains of Paradise + 1/4 tsp Sea Salt)
1oz low AA hop @ Flameout (about 170F)
1lb table sugar @flameout
1lb D180 Candi Syrup @flameout

Cool and pitch Mad Fermentationist blend

Add 5lb dried cherries in 2-3 weeks, then ferment another 2-3 weeks.

Excited for my first rip on this yeast blend.
 
Andrew Hodgson said:
Finally getting around to using this yeast for the first time:

Dark Saison 2019 AKA Dark Dickon Cherries

8lb Pilsner malt
3lb munich
3lb white wheat
.5lb special B

Mash-in at 131 for 15 min, raise to 148 and hold for an hour.

Boil, 60 minutes
1oz low AA hop @ 60
1 tsp Superfood nute @15
Spice Blend @ 15 (4g Coriander Seed + 2g Sweet Orange Peel + 2g Grains of Paradise + 1/4 tsp Sea Salt)
1oz low AA hop @ Flameout (about 170F)
1lb table sugar @flameout
1lb D180 Candi Syrup @flameout

Cool and pitch Mad Fermentationist blend

Add 5lb dried cherries in 2-3 weeks, then ferment another 2-3 weeks.

Excited for my first rip on this yeast blend.
Click to expand...

This is quickly becoming my house Saison blend. Very versatile and I love the Brett funk it adds
 
Just ordered 4lb of dried tart cherries for the dark Saison currently fermenting with the Mad Ferm blend.

The plan is to toss the cherries in with TYB 207 and maybe some rum-soaked oak cubes and let it rip for another month.

I am harvesting both the standard Mad Ferm blend, the TYB 207, and I will harvest the blend of both from the FV once it is racked.

Gotta get my Brett library up.
 
So the basic malt recipe has pretty much stayed the same I have changed the hops up using more traditional Saison hops but this version had more of a new world hop mix.

10 Gallon batch
RO water treated to match Antwerp water profile
Mash 90 mins @148

22 pounds Belgian Pilsner
4 pounds Munich (Weyermann)
3 pounds Wheat Malt (Weyermann)
2 pounds flaked barley
1 oz Warrior at 60 min
1 oz Galaxy 30 min whirlpool
1 oz Citra 30 min whirlpool
2 oz Citra Dry hop 5 days before keging
Mad Fermentationist yeast 4l starter decanted start fermentation in the high 60s then run it up to mid 80s over several days leave it there for a monthish.
 
jready said:
I have done the same recipe above but with noble hops. I just usually drop the dry hop and do a 10 min and flame out addition no whirlpool
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How did you like it? It seems that because the description of this blend mentions how well it works with American hops, people mostly use it that way. In your experience, did the noble hops work well with the yeast?
 
It's been a month since the TYB207 and dried cherries went into my dark saison on cherries. Will be packaging Friday or Saturday and will try to hold off two weeks to try the first bottle, anticipating it will reach it's peak a month after packaging or so. Airlock still smells cherry-forward but with some nice complexity.
 
Well, I got 83% attenuation out of this, a little disappointing as it went from 1.076 to 1.012 for 8.4%. These numbers don't include the fruit addition but it was dried fruit so it may be a tad higher than that.

Wasn't expecting this blend to poop out with a starter on this size of a beer, not a huge deal I can blend in some saison yeast so next time I can get the 90% + attenuation I am looking for, anyone else have this blend leave a little more sweetness than they thought? Used a 2L starter and nutes etc.
 
Andrew Hodgson said:
Well, I got 83% attenuation out of this, a little disappointing as it went from 1.076 to 1.012 for 8.4%. These numbers don't include the fruit addition but it was dried fruit so it may be a tad higher than that.

Wasn't expecting this blend to poop out with a starter on this size of a beer, not a huge deal I can blend in some saison yeast so next time I can get the 90% + attenuation I am looking for, anyone else have this blend leave a little more sweetness than they thought? Used a 2L starter and nutes etc.
Click to expand...
I don't understand why this beer didn't really dry out. How long ago was it pitched? At what temp? Really would expect 90%+ AA.

Was the starter built from a previous cake? Just wondering if there was some shift in culture composition.
 
It was pitched from a 2L starter fresh pouch, had fermentation activity as normal for a week and it died down, I dropped 4lb of dried cherries and some TYB207 brett in it and let it sit for another month. Not a huge deal a little disappointing but honestly this will likely make the beer more palatable for the masses with the residual sweetness and like I said I can supplement a saison yeast from my stash.

In hindsight I should have taken a sample and checked gravity before adding the fruit nut haven't had a saison under attenuate before, lesson learned.
 
Trying to dial in my table Saison beers. On 6/29 I brewed one that came out to 1.039 OG:
84% pils
8% raw wheat
4% Munich
4% oats
Some "aged" Fuggles at 60 min
1/2 oz Styrian Celeia at FO

Loosely based on JK Das Wunderkind

Wanted to keep the IBU low, but enough to keep the lacto in check. Pitched the Mad Fermentationist blend at about 65, let it go for a couple days in my basement then out to my garage for a little finishing heat. My brews don't want to climb too high when in my basement - good for lots of ales, not my Saisons!

Just checked it tonight - coming along nicely, 1.002 (95% AA), a little tart - not really sour at all - good phenols, just a touch of earthy funk which I will imagine will develop with time.

I contemplated adding 2.5 lbs of fresh apricots I got yesterday, but that seems like it would be a waste of fruit (at least 1 lb/gallon is recommended). I think I'll keg with a healthy dry hop charge in a couple weeks

This is my second go with this blend, and I think it's more impressive with the repitch. Just one guy's opinion...
 
Glad to see this thread keeping good notes on the blend. I really like it, and have all but made it my house primary strain. I only say that because I don't really have one for saisons / mixed ferm, I have a few Solera barrels and one of them uses this.

On the sacch side, I think this blend performs excellent, accentuates well (no stall here) and leaves a nice tart finish. My notes seem to match what Mike said, I don't think the Brett is assertive nor the lactic aggressive. My ~4 IBU aged hops went down to 3.75pH, and that's as low of IBUs as I've tried.

I just pitched this into a new barrel with dregs, fresh oak, and about 20 IBU of spelt saison at 1.048. Those dregs will be more aggressive but I do really enjoy the base sacch, I'd buy it as a purely clean isolated saison blend. I'm also a fan of Dupont 3724 and Saisonsteins Monster, FWIW. Will update on that barrel in months to come.
 
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This has also become my “house” saison yeast. It’s easy to control the tartness and there is just enough funk to initiate the uninitiated.
 
Made a funky dark saison inspired by the Mad Fermentationist recipes. Finally got around to kegging the this beer which I brewed 8/12/2017.

Grain Bill:
6# Bohemian Pilsner
3.75# White Wheat
3# Caravienna
0.75# Flaked Wheat
0.38# Special B
0.38# Acid Malt

Hops:
Saaz 4 IBUs

Other Additions:
1# D-180 Candi Syrup
32oz Just Tart Cherry Juice

OG: 1.066
FG: 1.010

Mash pH: 5.16
Final pH: 3.40

Plan is to force carb to 1 volume and then bottle from keg with CBC-1, cherry juice and dextrose to 2.75 volumes.
 
brownni5 said:
Trying to dial in my table Saison beers. On 6/29 I brewed one that came out to 1.039 OG:
84% pils
8% raw wheat
4% Munich
4% oats
Some "aged" Fuggles at 60 min
1/2 oz Styrian Celeia at FO

Loosely based on JK Das Wunderkind

Wanted to keep the IBU low, but enough to keep the lacto in check. Pitched the Mad Fermentationist blend at about 65, let it go for a couple days in my basement then out to my garage for a little finishing heat. My brews don't want to climb too high when in my basement - good for lots of ales, not my Saisons!

Just checked it tonight - coming along nicely, 1.002 (95% AA), a little tart - not really sour at all - good phenols, just a touch of earthy funk which I will imagine will develop with time.

I contemplated adding 2.5 lbs of fresh apricots I got yesterday, but that seems like it would be a waste of fruit (at least 1 lb/gallon is recommended). I think I'll keg with a healthy dry hop charge in a couple weeks

This is my second go with this blend, and I think it's more impressive with the repitch. Just one guy's opinion...
Click to expand...

Just cracked this for the first time the other day - by far my best mixed- ferm Saison to date. I dry-hopped with 1 oz Strisselspalt (I love Continental hops).

On the nose I get a.lot of barnyard aromas. I couldn't reconcile that until I read my notes - I also pitched the dregs of another mixed ferm Saison that I brewed with Omega C2C - that blend gets really horsey for me.

The taste is tart - perfectly so - with lots of nice stone fruits and spice, I would imagine both from the hops and primary yeast. At 3.2 volumes and all the raw grain, the mouthfeel is substantial for a beer finishing at 1.002 (or lower now).

I need to brew with this again!
 
Andrew Hodgson said:
let it sit for another month
Click to expand...
Maybe I'm off, here, but doesn't it take much longer for brett to bring everything down closer to 1.000? Were you expecting the saison sacc to fermenter lower or the brett to?

I'm doing a deeper dive into belgian-y beers lately, and in reading Stan's "Brew Like a Monk", I read a passage in there stating something along the lines of (i'm paraphrasing) belgian yeast often do 90% of the fermentation up front and quickly, but it takes a long time for that renaming 10%. All in all, i'm wondering if just more time would have gotten you to where you wanted (either from the sacc or the brett). Or maybe a warmer ferment? I don't remember seeing what temp you fermented/aged at.
 
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I recently had a very strange experience with this blend. I bought 2 packs back in August when they had a release. I used one of those packs without a starter in October, and that beer fermented about how I would have expected. Well, I wasn't able to use the next pack until January, so it was 5 months old at that point. I made a starter, and it acted sort of weird. It never developed a krausen, but it definitely fermented out. (I know starters don't always form krausens, but this blend had done so in the past.) I made a low-gravity (1.040) beer heavily hopped with noble hops (36 IBUs), and it fermented out just fine. I also added Jester King dregs to the fermenter when I dry-hopped at the tail-end of fermentation. The weird part is that the beer got much more tart than I would have expected, and there were virtually no saison-like esters (maybe because of the acidity?). The beer isn't bad, but I intentionally added lots of hops to prevent it from getting this tart, so that's pretty disappointing. Also, it is tart enough that it clashes a bit with the bitterness.
 
cmhaynes said:
I also added Jester King dregs to the fermenter when I dry-hopped at the tail-end of fermentation. The weird part is that the beer got much more tart than I would have expected, and there were virtually no saison-like esters (maybe because of the acidity?).
Click to expand...

Jester King dregs are going to have all kinds of microflora, including some hop tolerant LAB. Brett will metabolize quite a few esters and phenols as well, see here: http://www.milkthefunk.com/wiki/Brettanomyces#Secondary_Metabolites ... So the key question is how long has the beer been inoculated with those dregs?
 
goodolarchie said:
Jester King dregs are going to have all kinds of microflora, including some hop tolerant LAB. Brett will metabolize quite a few esters and phenols as well, see here: http://www.milkthefunk.com/wiki/Brettanomyces#Secondary_Metabolites ... So the key question is how long has the beer been inoculated with those dregs?
Click to expand...
This beer was brewed around the middle of January and was only in primary for about 2 weeks. I added the JK dregs maybe 3 days into the fermentation. It's been in the bottles for about 5 weeks now. So, the dregs have had roughly 7 weeks. What's interesting is that the last few bottles of Le Petit Prince haven't been even close to this tart, and they were much older. It just occurred to me, though, that since I added the dregs, I won't know for sure what created the acidity unless I brew with the blend by itself again. Ha...oh well. I think with some age, this could turn into a pretty good beer.
 
cmhaynes said:
the beer got much more tart than I would have expected, and there were virtually no saison-like esters
Click to expand...
cmhaynes said:
I added the JK dregs maybe 3 days into the fermentation.
Click to expand...
Acidity mutes yeast flavor. In this case the bacteria in the dregs produced acidity early in fermentation and suppress the flavor expression of your primary yeast. The beer flavor was also likely suppressed.

You need to add the dregs after primary fermentation completes. You'd also benefit from using aged hops, which inhibit the bacteria but less bitterness.

It might improve over time, but it won't develop the "Saison esters" (actually you're probably taking about phenolics) you want.
 
cmhaynes said:
I added the JK dregs maybe 3 days into the fermentation. It's been in the bottles for about 5 weeks now. So, the dregs have had roughly 7 weeks. What's interesting is that the last few bottles of Le Petit Prince haven't been even close to this tart, and they were much older.
Click to expand...

There are a lot of factors that could have led to the increased acidity, but generally speaking, throwing spontaneous dregs (such as JK, Allagash, De Garde, and any true lambic) is a YOLO, especially only 3 days in. Don't get me wrong, my best beers have used dregs, but I don't go into them expecting to recreate that beer. Throwing LAB at higher pH wort with lots of fermentable sugars has a lot of metabolic paths to add acidity. Some brett strains even produce a genuine tartness, and don't care about your IBUs. I have one brett strain I co-pitch with Sacch in primary, it routinely gets the beer down to 3.7pH in 4 weeks. Hell, even some sacch strains can finish quite tart, and now Lallemand has their sourvisiae.

Like RPh said, if you want saison phenols like the classic 4vg (clove, spice), you should delay pitching a culture like MFB. You can also ramp up the heat, underpitch, do other things to stress the yeast out, but this can lead to mixed results. Pitching from a new packet I get some phenols early on and the brett is somewhat mild, and stonefruity. But compared to using Dupont then Orval strains / dregs, I get a much more phenolic beer. Bottom line, pitching such diverse dregs that early on means you have gone completely offroad, and there is no real map other than the one you chart for yourself.
 
RPh_Guy said:
Acidity mutes yeast flavor. In this case the bacteria in the dregs produced acidity early in fermentation and suppress the flavor expression of your primary yeast. The beer flavor was also likely suppressed.

You need to add the dregs after primary fermentation completes. You'd also benefit from using aged hops, which inhibit the bacteria but less bitterness.

It might improve over time, but it won't develop the "Saison esters" (actually you're probably taking about phenolics) you want.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I guessed the acidity had suppressed the expression of the yeast. A couple of years ago, I made a similar batch without the dregs, and the hops did seem to inhibit the lacto strain in the blend. I just greatly underestimated the JK dregs. I thought 6 ounces of hops (throughout the process, including a dry-hop) in a 3.5-gallon batch would keep the bacteria at bay. When I said I hoped it would improve with a bit of age, I meant once the bitterness fades a little. I realize the saison phenolics won't ever be a part of this beer. Thanks for the advice.
 
goodolarchie said:
There are a lot of factors that could have led to the increased acidity, but generally speaking, throwing spontaneous dregs (such as JK, Allagash, De Garde, and any true lambic) is a YOLO, especially only 3 days in. Don't get me wrong, my best beers have used dregs, but I don't go into them expecting to recreate that beer. Throwing LAB at higher pH wort with lots of fermentable sugars has a lot of metabolic paths to add acidity. Some brett strains even produce a genuine tartness, and don't care about your IBUs. I have one brett strain I co-pitch with Sacch in primary, it routinely gets the beer down to 3.7pH in 4 weeks. Hell, even some sacch strains can finish quite tart, and now Lallemand has their sourvisiae.

Like RPh said, if you want saison phenols like the classic 4vg (clove, spice), you should delay pitching a culture like MFB. You can also ramp up the heat, underpitch, do other things to stress the yeast out, but this can lead to mixed results. Pitching from a new packet I get some phenols early on and the brett is somewhat mild, and stonefruity. But compared to using Dupont then Orval strains / dregs, I get a much more phenolic beer. Bottom line, pitching such diverse dregs that early on means you have gone completely offroad, and there is no real map other than the one you chart for yourself.
Click to expand...
Thanks for such a well-thought-out reply. I just greatly underestimated the contribution of the JK dregs pitched so early. Next time, I'll add them at bottling. I didn't expect to recreate any JK beers, just to make something inspired by them. I mentioned Petit Prince above because the most recent bottles I've had of it have only been the slightest bit tart, so I'm very curious as to how JK controls the acidity in it.
 

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