Cool Looking Pellicle

A few weeks ago I made a yeast starter from some oak cubes that I received from a fellow homebrewer. They were innoculated with a buffet of bugs from different lambics and such. I poured all of the liquid from the starter into my lambic and then poured the chips into a fresh erlinmyer with some fresh wort to make another starter and I am getting this really cool pellicle growth going on. It is like powdery little snowbanks scattered about on the surface of the wort. Pretty cool, at least if you are geeky like I am.

Brettanomyces Claussenii WLP645 Beer

Well I just brewed up my first funky beer, a 10 gallon batch of Flanders Red, now it's time to get a starter going for funk monster #2. I am getting a starter going tonight using the Brettanomyces Claussenii strain from White Labs. Before I can use this to ferment a whole 5-6 gallon batch of beer I need to grow up the amount of yeast I have. The vial that you can order from White Labs isn't intended to take care of your entire primary fermentation. It is meant to be used in conjunction with another yeast, more than likely of the Saccromyces variety. I am going to get a pint starter going tonight and in about 10 days I will pour off most of the wort trying to leave as much of the yeast behind as I can and then I will pitch another fresh pint of wort. I will repeat this a few times until I have a large enough amount of cells to take care of a 5-6 gallon batch of beer.


DO NOT SWIRL AN ERLINMYER FLASK FULL OF BOILING HOT WORT!Son of a bitch! I knew that too and I still did it. I've burnt my hands so many times that I think I am starting to get immune to it.

48 HOURS LATER
It has been two days since I made my starter and I haven't seen any real activity going yet. I was hoping to see an obvious sign that everything was going smooth because I am going out of town for the weekend and I don't want to have to worry about it. I added a little bit of servomyces earlier today to help it on its way. I was glad to see that someone on the BBB website was posting about their experience with their WLP645 starter at the same time as I was doing mine because I can learn from all his posts. Everything seems to be sitting on the bottom right now.