Beer Forum

I'm gonna brew 10 gals of low gravity (1.049) american pale single hopped with Australian Topaz tomorrow and I want to split the batch with 1056 and White Labs 670 American Farmhouse mostly to fit the 670 into my homebrew club's yeast experiment competition. Here's my question, I'm making a small starter mostly to revive the 2 vials that are 1.5 months old and I was wondering if I should try to drop the pH with some salts (chalk maybe?) to make the environment a little more conducive to brett growth to get a stronger brett character more quickly. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

When you say 1.5 months old, are we talking past the best by date, or just when you bought them? Chalk will send you in the wrong direction if you are trying to lower the pH. Also keep in mind that blends of yeast will behave differently in starters, and you will likely get Sach growth, but not much from the Brett.

spiderwrangler wrote:When you say 1.5 months old, are we talking past the best by date, or just when you bought them? Chalk will send you in the wrong direction if you are trying to lower the pH. Also keep in mind that blends of yeast will behave differently in starters, and you will likely get Sach growth, but not much from the Brett.

Counting backwards from the "best by" date, they are 1.5 months old. I know that blends will behave differently and grow at different ratios, but I was hoping to make the brett happier but I assume they won't grow much overnight (I'm brewing tomorrow) so I should have started sooner. What would I add to lower the pH then? Gypsum or CaCl maybe?

Brett grows very slow. I suggest you make no changes to your starter and give your beer 3 months to develop.

Yes, sorry if that wasn't clear in my initial response... chalk won't help you lower the pH, but I don't think that lowering it will help you as a starter isn't going to help you much in terms of Brett.

I would make a starter for the 1056 and probably wouldn't bother for the 670 farmhouse ale. At 1.5 mos old your vials aren't that old and a 1.049 OG is not a big starting gravity. The sacch. in the 670 will be just fine and will attenuate accordingly and what is left behind will be for the brett to chew on over time. That farmhouse ale blend is nice b/c the brett is quite subtle even after some aging time.

If you really felt the need to then you could make a starter for the farmhouse blend too. The sacch. would wake up faster than the brett though as stated above. And chalk is typically used as a buffer for the acidity produced by brett when long term storage is used.

Thanks for the replies, I ended up making a very small starter (~800mL) just to wake up the yeast and pitched it the next day. Primary ferment seems to be done and the Brett is hopefully taking over. I will post back with results.