Dregs Culturing Crooked Stave ?

I recently made a starter to pitch some dregs from a bottle of Crooked Stave's St. Bretta Autumn, the blood orange. The year is this year's batch.

Anyway it's been around 5 days since I pitched and I took a small whiff last night and whoa! Sour yogurt/milk smells galore!

Is this normal?

Even though the St. Bretta is supposed to be all Brettanomyces, the guy at the brewery said that it has all the bugs as well - due to the barrels having all the bugs (lacto & pedio). He also said it was the easiest beer to obtain a culture from.

Yeah its probably normal. I actually used dregs from that, Orval and some Anchorage brews in a saison. It had a bunch of awesome flavors but came out as a full-on sour. I was shooting for a tart funky brett

In the future, I guess you need to use beers you know are only "bottled with brett" instead of anything in barrels. I know this is true for Orval and Anchorage's Galaxy White IPA. Love that stuff.

Or find other 100% bretts that aren't aged. Evil Twin has like 10 or more 100% brett beers you can check out.

Well that's encouraging - I wasn't sure what those smells were telling me... also a note, there were no visible signs of fermentation.... weird. Although there is a very light slurry on the bottom of my flask.

Did you pitch dregs after primary fermentation or all together into unfermented wort?

I started pitching all the dregs I used probably after 7 days. I was going to wait till primary completely finished but I was staring down those Galaxy White IPAs

Thanks for the input, I'll keep an eye open for a bottle of that Galaxy white IPA to try. And to culture!

Yeah I bought damn near every one of the bottles at my store and noticed they had to restock it recently. Its become my new favorite.

I actually harvested some dregs from it. Its a blend of brett (brux I think) and champaign yeast. With the help of some yeast energizer, I managed to innoculate a 500ml starter from the dregs of just one 24oz bottle. Took like 3 days to show life though. I tossed it into a Black Tripel as a secondary thats just starting to pellicle.