Brett

[Moley]

I asked a question about reclaiming yeasts from some of Uncle's new treasures and he said:

As for reclaiming the yeast, I'm putting most of the empty bottles in my neighbours recycling I don't want Brett in my garage.

I assumed that wasn't some sort of personal slight against forum member Eradite or any others with that real name so I did a forum search but didn't find much apart from some comments by lancsSteve in this topic.

So what is it, what does it do, how do you catch it and do you really have to burn down your brewery and start again if it gets in? Is this just a Belgian thing or is there anything else to avoid?

 

[snail59]

I have found THIS.

 

[TheMumbler]

Brett is a wild yeast, Brettanomyces which will happily grow in beer. The reason that it worries people so much is that it can form a biofilm which makes it harder to shift than other contaminating organisms.

 

[Moley]

.... and back to Wiki.

Snail's link said that Brett lives on fruit skins, and I make country wines from fruits, usually with either boiling water or metabusulphite to knock out wild yeasts, but that would seem to be the first good reason I've found for using separate buckets and fermenters for wine and beer.

 

[phettebs]

I used it in an old ale I brewed several years ago. I used separate bucket, secondary, siphon, and hoses. It also forms a nasty pellicle on top of the beer. I think it's an acquired taste though. I didn't really care for it when I first tried it. But since then, I've had several commercial beers that had Brett in them that tasted just like mine.