Are Dregs Enough?

I'm about to embark on my first sour beer journey. I've read up on how to brew these beers and have listened to a number of helpful podcasts. Personally, I love the character that comes from the Russian River house blend of bugs. I contacted Vinny to see if the famous wood chips inoculated with their house blend still existed, but it does not. He recommended that I could get their yeast and bacteria from a bottle of Supplication, Consecration, etc. I'm wondering if using the dregs (or last 10%) of one of these beers is enough to introduce the lacto/pedio/brett that I want, or if I should pitch something from White Labs. Furthermore, I'm worried that if I make a starter to build these up, I'll end up mostly building up the native wine yeast that Vinnie says they use to bottle condition. Any advice? Stick with something from White Labs or get adventurous?

viability would be my fist concern.

I would add dregs with wyest or white labs.

Im sure other will chime in here soon.

This is kind of what I was thinking. Thanks for the advice.

I have yet to test a beer from the dregs of only Russian River. I do have a bottle of Consecration that I will soon be using. I have had good luck with other dregs.
I would suggest you make a small starter and see what you get. You can taste it and if it seems like it is going in the right direction then step it up again.
But to be safe and to have enough to pitch for a 5 gal batch then you should go with the Wyeast or White Labs choices.
Here is a link to the thread about using dregs in test batches:
https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f127/easy-way-make-sour-beers-1-gal-wort-dregs-189748/

Yes. I have a strong dark that I pitched supplication dregs into. It formed a nice pellicle and samples are super funky and acidic.

wonderbread23 said:

Yes. I have a strong dark that I pitched supplication dregs into. It formed a nice pellicle and samples are super funky and acidic.

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It's tasting good?

mkade said:

It's tasting good?

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Yeah, it's actually pretty tasty at about 6 months in. The acid is a bit sharp for my taste, so I'm hoping it melds a bit more (I think this is a result of the massive amount of dextrins I put in the base wort). I might consider doing some back blending before kegging to mellow it out a bit. It definitely has the RR house flavor to me.

wonderbread23 said:

Yes. I have a strong dark that I pitched supplication dregs into. It formed a nice pellicle and samples are super funky and acidic.

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I've got 2 small bottles of Supplication. Would one be close to what you used? Did you use anything else with it? I have some Safbrew T58 I could start it with in primary then add dregs to the secondary.

boostsr20 said:

I've got 2 small bottles of Supplication. Would one be close to what you used? Did you use anything else with it? I have some Safbrew T58 I could start it with in primary then add dregs to the secondary.

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I used 1 bottle of Supplication + 1 bottle of Orval ... dregs only. Right now it is incredibly sour. For fermentation, I pitched a smack pack of Trappist yeast, let it go for a couple days, crashed cooled to get most of the yeast out of suspension, and then racked to another vessel and pitched the dregs.

wonderbread23 said:

I used 1 bottle of Supplication + 1 bottle of Orval ... dregs only. Right now it is incredibly sour. For fermentation, I pitched a smack pack of Trappist yeast, let it go for a couple days, crashed cooled to get most of the yeast out of suspension, and then racked to another vessel and pitched the dregs.

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Too sour?

Dregs to a great job as long as the beer is relatively fresh. The older the beer is the few of the microbes will be viable. At a minimum I would pitch a healthy starter of Sacch along with the dregs to make sure you get a healthy primary fermentation. You could certainly pitch Roeselare or one of the other blends, to make sure you have some of each of the microbes, but you certainly don't need to.

Also FYI, you aren't missing much with the chips. They made a couple good beers for me, but none of them got sour enough for my tastes.

Good luck.

mkade said:

Too sour?

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Possibly. It is still pretty young (6-8 months) and I plan on adding fruit at some point. If it is too sour, I will likely blend it with another beer. Over sourness is probably more of a recipe issue than an issue of the dregs I used. I made an extremely dextrin heavy wort to have lots of food for the bugs... possibly too much.

I added dregs (about 4 oz. of beer/yeast sludge) from the bottom of a bottle of Troegs Splinter Blue to my lambic, and a week and a half later it already has white funk growing on the top of it. Not a full-on pellicle yet, but it'll be there pretty soon. Then again, that beer was young as hell when we bottled it, and the conditioning yeast is probably still alive and kicking, too.

Going to hit it with dregs from a bottle of Cantillon Gueze sometime soon, too. Gotta get around to drinking that, yum!

SkinnyShamrock said:

I added dregs (about 4 oz. of beer/yeast sludge) from the bottom of a bottle of Troegs Splinter Blue to my lambic, and a week and a half later it already has white funk growing on the top of it. Not a full-on pellicle yet, but it'll be there pretty soon. Then again, that beer was young as hell when we bottled it, and the conditioning yeast is probably still alive and kicking, too.

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Good to know...I have a bottle in the fridge :rockin:

just got some Russian river in 2 days ago.
Dregs are bubbling in a starter nicely.

I just pitched the dregs of 375 ml Consecration into the wort from my Belgian Golden Strong (1.060). Here is a link to a post with pictures that I will continue to update.
http://jeffreycrane.blogspot.com/2010/10/dreg-series-russian-river-golden-sour.html

I got an email from Vinnie regarding cloning Supplication, and he told me that after primary they add Brett which works for 2 months before they add the other bugs (Pedio/lacto, etc). For a homebrew, is it safe to assume that it should be OK if I add everything (brett, pedio, lacto) at once?

I'm sure you will be fine. Its not like your going in with expectations of it being a dead on clone. If anything, you'll just end up with less horse blanket which wouldn't be a bad thing at all. I'm more curious on how long they secondary it for.