Growing up bottle dregs

Typically I use commercial cultures and dregs from various sour ales in the sour ales that I brew. This time around I want to take a different approach. I am going to do a traditional lambic using the turbid mash schedule in Wild Brews. What I would like to do is grow up a resonable pitch of Cantillon Classic Gueuze dregs and use only that for the fermentation. I have grown up standard sacc yeast from bottle dregs before but I have not attempted to do the same with sour ale dregs. I typically just add dregs to the fermenter with the commercial culture. What process should I follow? Are there any tips or tricks any of you have had success with? Thanks in advance for your help.

The problem will be trying to get all the critters grown in a useful combination. For example, you could culture any remaining sacc and lacto in an aerated starter with a neutral pH. You will culture brett in an aerated starter in a low pH but the low pH will inhibit sacc and lacto to some degree. However, any aeration will inhibit or kill pedio.

I know first hand that trying to culture brett from dregs of Orval takes 1-2 weeks to get fermentation started in a small starter with fairly low pH. I can't imagine how long it would take to get sufficient brett and if you even could culture pedio within a reasonable period of time.

I have successfully cultured the brett strain from the New Glarus R&D Goden Ale but the more i think about it any attempt at "growing" a pitch will result in throwing off the balance of what I am trying to achieve. I think I am just going to have to get a few sour beer loving friends over for a marathon consumption of the Gueuze and pitch the dregs in their state and go from there. I can only assume that the sacc will have died off from the dregs and a clean commercial strain is going to be needed to augment the dregs. Honestly, this is the part I love about brewing with bugs. the planning and discussion are fun as hell. Thanks for the post RAM.

Is there any practical reason why you couldn't make three different starters with different levels of pH and aeration to isolate the strains - blending them later or pitching separately as desired?

Aside from the expense of getting enough bottles for all three ^ ^

What I've done a few times before with success is building two starters... a 10*P wort starter (1.040) and a smaller 2*P YPD starter. The wort starter goes on the stir plate which allows the brett and sacc yeast to grow. The YPD starter just sits in a jar.

YPD = yeast hulls, peptides, and dextrose. For peptides you can use any protein source, I use whey protein. For each liter you would use 10g of yeast hulls, 10g of protein and 20g of dextrose (corn sugar). I find the yeast hulls in the health food section of my grocery store, sold in bulk cheap. For a 5 gallon batch 1L is plenty big enough, and I'd do a 2L wort starter leaving it on the plate for two full weeks to give the brett time to develop.

Good luck

How long do you let the YPD starter go Sacc?

BenjaminBier said:

Is there any practical reason why you couldn't make three different starters with different levels of pH and aeration to isolate the strains - blending them later or pitching separately as desired?

Click to expand...

I think this is a good idea. Lambic producers will acid wash the barrels to knockdown the bacterial populations when things get too sour. Why can't you do the same with a starter? Grow up the dregs until you have a nice cell pellet, then drop the pH to 2.0 and leave in the fridge overnight, then neutralize the pH back to 5-6 range and re-feed the starter. See what happens?