Harveys Brett Strain

[seymour]

After some reading, it turns out that the Harvey's strain doesn't contain brett at all. The wild yeast which is producing the 'bretty' flavours is, apparently, a strain of Debaryomyces Hansenii. This is a very weird strain which, because it can live in up to 24% saline environments, is more often used for making cheese or sausage...

As the good lord Brian said, "Blessed are the cheesemakers..."

[GarethYoung]

First beer containing this stuff is in the fermenter. It's 1.048 saisonish thing, hopped with El Dorado and fermenting with a blend of yeasts: T-58, Brett Trois, Orval brett (the three of which came from a previous batch), some yeast and bugs cultured from a Fantome bottle and some of the Harvey's strain.

Going to do something simpler with it at the weekend, hopefully including a 100% debaryomyces portion!

[Hanglow]

bump


any update Gareth?

[GarethYoung]

Unfortunately nothing new to report on the yeast. I'm sending a sample to friend in the U.S., who works in a lab, who says he'll isolate it and do a science on it. I was meant to have sent the sample a while ago, but I've been too busy. Going to post it today though, and I'll report back the results.

Good news on that saison, though - I submitted it to the UK National Home Brewing Awards and won first place!

[seymour]

...Good news on that saison, though - I submitted it to the UK National Home Brewing Awards and won first place!

That's fantastic, congratulations!

[orlando]

Followed this thread with some interest as I was at the brewery last November and met Miles Jenner, he took me to see the fermentors containing the Imperial Stout. I asked him at some point if they used their yeast for everything they brew and he confirmed this. If there is Brett in it he didn't mention it and it would surprise me. I also took a bottle away with me as I wanted to capture the yeast too. My effort failed unfortunately and what made it worse was I didn't enjoy the beer either. I think I just don't like highly alcoholic beers. The lab analysis will be of interest so will be watching for updates. One thing I will say is Harvey's Best Bitter is probably the best beer in England that I have tasted, sure there are other candidates and can't wait to try them, as anything better will have me in tears of joy.

[Wonkydonkey]

I've got a starter of white labs brett c sitting on the kitchen counter that I haven't worked out what to do with yet. Problem is I'm all out of base malt and our club order won't come in for a fortnight (and I refuse to pay online prices), so all I can think of is doing half-half Munich and wheat with some spicy German Noble hops and fermenting it warm. I'd love to get a black cherry note, but I suspect that's down to a reaction between brett and a darker crystal malt. What was the beer in question?

And where can I get some four year old Harvey s imp stout Gareth?!

Does anyone know if you can popover to Harvey's and would they give you a slosh outa the bottom. It's only up the road from me.

[orlando]

I've got a starter of white labs brett c sitting on the kitchen counter that I haven't worked out what to do with yet. Problem is I'm all out of base malt and our club order won't come in for a fortnight (and I refuse to pay online prices), so all I can think of is doing half-half Munich and wheat with some spicy German Noble hops and fermenting it warm. I'd love to get a black cherry note, but I suspect that's down to a reaction between brett and a darker crystal malt. What was the beer in question?

And where can I get some four year old Harvey s imp stout Gareth?!

Does anyone know if you can popover to Harvey's and would they give you a slosh outa the bottom. It's only up the road from me.

Yes. No.

I asked the same question in a roundabout sort of way and Miles said they had stopped doing it as they were sick of Micro breweries staring up on the basis of it and then getting tax breaks on what they sell. Not his exact words you appreciate but a reasonably accurate précis. Micros can afford to undercut Harvey's prices so he didn't feel too disposed to enabling competition. Can't blame him can you?

[Wonkydonkey]

Arwell, if that's what he implied. I won't bother trying. Although I did go on a trip around the brewery many moons ago ( must be 20yrs), and remembering, the speaker asking if there were any home brewers in the audience, one guy put his hand up and it was offered but at the time I was not brewing.

I guess time change . So it's back to the bottle culturing.

Thanks for the info.

[GarethYoung]

Here's an update on this. Tests so far suggest that the culture I sent him contains a non-saccharomyces, non-brettanomyces yeast strain, and the tests are consistent with that strain being debaryomyces. Hopefully we'll get something more definite soon. Here's the info from the guy that he's posted elsewhere:

"I’ve got stuff up on plates and in tubes.

What I did-

I made 1:10 serial dilutions of what Gareth sent me in a medium made of Yeast Extract, Malt Extract, Peptone, and Glucose (YPGM). From the 10^-3 dilution, I streaked onto agar plates made of the same medium+1.5g/L agar powder. Tubes were incubated at 25, and plates were incubated at 25, 30, and 37 degrees C.

All of the tubes show growth, with the 10^-1, 10^-2, and 10^-3 showing pelicle formation. There is only slight turbidity in the 10^-4 tube, so I’d expect once the cell number get high enough we will also see a pelicle there.

I also got two distinct colony morphologies on the plates incubated at 30 degrees. Only one type of colony was present on the 25 degree plates, and no growth was observed on the 37 degree plates. The colonies on the 25 degree plates are identical to one of the morphologies on the 30 degree plates, so we are dealing with a mixed culture of at least two organisms. For now, I’m calling them "Deb 1" and "Deb 2". Deb 2 looks like run of the mill Sacch to me, whereas Deb 1 looks like some of the environmental isolates I’ve cultured before; Flat, spreading, white-grey in color.

Because Debaromyces is supposed to be very resistant to chlorine dioxide, I used both isolates, the sample Gareth sent me, and one of the dilution tubes to set up a series of incubations with or without chlorine dioxide at an initial concentration of 0.3mg/L. If one of the isolates grows, that would be great. Otherwise, the chlorine dioxide will serve to enrich the mixed population for whatever (very) small number of Debaromyces are there, and then I will attempt again to isolate on a plate."

Then:

"Little update.

I ran PCR on the two isolates I have using a technique nearly identical to the one described in this blog post by another person keen on beer microbiology: http://beer.suregork.com/?p=3598

Turns out this technique has been used a number of times for the rapid identification from brewery "contaminants"- See Evaluation of ITS PCR and RFLP for Differentiation and Identification of Brewing Yeast and Brewery ‘Wild’ Yeast Contaminants and Sequence-based identification of species belonging to the genus Debaryomyces for examples.

Here are the results of that PCR (I’ve inverted the colors, as I prefer to see the bands in black...plus, it saves on ink if/when I print the picture for my notes!)



Lanes 1 and 6 are 1KB ladder from NEB.
Lane 2 is a Brett isolate from WLP.
Lane 3 and 4 are the two isolates from the sample I was sent.
Lane 5 is an isolate from Black Label Gueuze that I wanted to identify (A Brett, for reasons that you should be able to work out by the end of this)

Lane 2 shows me that the primers and my PCR protocol work (on Brett at least).

Lane 3 and 4 indicate that the two isolates are distinct (pretty easy to tell from morphology too), and that neither of the isolates are likely Brett, due to the different size bands.

Ideally, I would have had a Sacch isolate to run as well, but I didn’t have any grown up, but I think that it’s a fairly safe bet that Lane 4 is a Sacch.

Lane 3 I’m not so sure on. BUT, suffice it to say that it’s NOT the size that Debaromyces has been reported to be using these primers.

So, I’m currently working on doing some other stuff to try to pull out what Debaromyces might be present in the samples."

Exciting!

[GarethYoung]

Actually, I think I misread that the first time (perhaps I managed to miss the 'NOT' in the second last line!) Looks like we haven't found the debaryomyces yet, if it's there at all.