Orval Yeast Brew - Brettanomyces

First Post!

In the spirit of trying new things, this first post will be about an brewing experiment.

I recently brought back a couple Trappist beers from Belgium most of which were Orval (my favourite). I decided to try and culture the yeast from the bottle and this will serve as a catalogue of the tasty results, or so we hope.

Supposedly Orval bottle conditions their beer with both the primary strain and a mix of "local yeasts" which includes brettanomyces [1], so hopefully I will be able to get flavour contributions from both yeasts.

After sanitizing the neck of the bottle and pouring the beer into a glass, I swirled and dumped the dregs from the bottle into ~300 ml of ~1.050 starter wort made from just DME and water. The lag time was quite long -  two days-ish - but the fermentation finally kicked off and was quite active, producing a solid inch of foam. Once the fermentation was finished the starter had a pretty funky smell, indicating some significant brett activity (despite what "they" say about not getting much brett growth in a starter)[2]. The resulting starter beer actually tasted kinda nasty, with a heavy taste of the "horse blanket" that is often used to describe bad brett fermentation.

Despite the not-so-good funkyness of the starter beer I brewed a simple beer and pitched the starter. For a 3 gallon batch the recipe was as follows :
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2 kg Pilsner malt
1 kg Wheat malt
150 g Crystal III

Mash @ 64 C for 1 hour

60 min boil

10 g  Tettnanger    FWH
10 g  Fuggles        FWH
10 g  Fuggles        50 min
10 g  Tettnanger   10 min
(10 g  Fuggles      Dry Hop)???

OG 1.050
Fermented at room temperature (~22 C ambient).

Pitched cultured Orval dregs.
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The fermentation was insane! I only had a 3 gallon batch in a 5 gallon carboy and the foam still overflowed.

The Gravity came down from 1.050 to 1.008.

The hydrometer sample tasted really good. Significant spicy phenols with a fruity, almost citrusy character. Diacetyl was noticeable but hopefully that will clear up in secondary. Also I hope the secondary fermentation will let the Brett do its thing and add some funk to the mix. Some very very mild funk could be detected in the sample as of yet, almost a shadow of funk (that's a good band name).

That's all for now...  I'll be back with more news.

[1] Brew Like a Monk, Stan Hieronymus, Brewers Publications, 2005.
[2] http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f12/first-brett-beer-orval-dregs-372700 , as of 12/16/2012.