How much Orval dregs for barleywine.

I want to brett one gallon of my english barleywine. Its 9.5% alcohol and finished at 1.020. I have two small bottles of Orval that say they were bottled on 10/2/2011 which I assume means february since today is only 9/30.

Should I pitch both?

Just 1 will do, but if you drink both, use both.

Like mentioned, 1 good but for quicker bacteria flavor, 2 will help.
In international dates its year month day. 100211 is feb 11, 2010.
Drunken trivia

Trivia: Orval writes out the full year so they just use the very easy to understand day month year format.

Why we use month day year I will never know. It does beat year day month in all numbers like I had to do for security paperwork in the USAF all the time.

I've had mostly good, but some mixed results, with Orval dregs. This probably isn't too helpful, but I would add that it depends on a few things, namely:

• Viability of the yeast within each individual bottle
  • tons of factors here (shipping, storage, temps, etc)
• Your goal & how long you are willing to wait for results
  • do you want subtle brett character, super funky, do you want to retain the barleywine body/sweetness or let it get really dry, etc.

1.020 is a good amount of residual sugar for the dregs to work on so it could go for awhile. Having said that, a 1 gallon jug as your fermenter gives you the luxury of easily cold crashing or pasteurizing once you are happy with the flavor profile.

So I ended up adding the dregs of two Orval bottles to my gallon of finished beer one week ago. I do not see any activity at all. Is this normal? I'm even using an S-type airlock to make it easier to see if there is any CO2 activity.

skyebrewing said:

In international dates its year month day. 100211 is feb 11, 2010.
Drunken trivia

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Very drunken trivia. And the first I've heard of it, or seen it, written that way. It's typically, in Europe at least, DD/MM/YYYY to avoid confusion on the year part. Sometimes YY instead of the four, which can add confusion if everything is under 12.

Rolly said:

So I ended up adding the dregs of two Orval bottles to my gallon of finished beer one week ago. I do not see any activity at all. Is this normal? I'm even using an S-type airlock to make it easier to see if there is any CO2 activity.

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It's going to be a while before you see any activity in the beer. Since brett does not produce CO2 at the same level as sacc strains you are probably more likely to see a pellicle form than bubbling in the airlock.

Rolly said:

So I ended up adding the dregs of two Orval bottles to my gallon of finished beer one week ago. I do not see any activity at all. Is this normal? I'm even using an S-type airlock to make it easier to see if there is any CO2 activity.

Click to expand...

You need to wait months, not weeks.

ReverseApacheMaster said:

It's going to be a while before you see any activity in the beer. Since brett does not produce CO2 at the same level as sacc strains you are probably more likely to see a pellicle form than bubbling in the airlock.

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I don't think that decreased CO2 production by brett is a commonly held belief any longer.