Yeast Solera/dregs collection questions..

Ok, I ahve a little collection of yeast/bacteria/bugs going; Boulevard Lovechild, Pretty Things Jack D Or, Crabtree Berliner, 4 different Jolly Pumpkin and Odells Medler, and some others I can not remember. I have fed them once and have a nice half inch cake on the bottom of a growler, I wish I would not have added the Jack D'Or, since it has 3 yeast strains in it and I believe a champagne yeast, but anyway... I am hoping the rest of the goodies will take a good hold.

My questions:

1. Should I make a traditional starter on the stirplate for this if I want to use it as my primary yeast(s) in a brew?

2. How much of the cake do I need to pull out to make a starter, I want to save some to keep growing it.

3. Do I use a normal DME base for a starter?

4. Dark wort or lighter, would love to make a sour blonde with half and maybe a sour stout with another portion?

Thanks All!

Just me personally. 1 if you are only doing five gallons I wouldnt worry about a starter, that is a good amount of dregs. 2 pitch the whole cake, you can siphon some of the cake of the new beer to start another one. 3 I would make a starter of a normal sacc yeast to pitch alongside your dregs.

I would just mash high, maybe pitch half the normal amount of sacch to ferment down to 1.020-1.30ish, then just siphon off a quart of your solera when you are ready to inoculate. No need to actually pitch the cake, since there is plenty of goodies in suspension. If you are worried about it your could stir your solera a tad to mix up some of the cake. You could also just pitch the some of the solera from the beginning since there are probably a few sacch strains already mixed in there, depends on what you are aiming for.

how big is this collection? I would just mix it up, pitch around a qt, and then top it back off to keep it going. i may just being biased cuz i did this 2 days ago tho

1. Should I make a traditional starter on the stirplate for this if I want to use it as my primary yeast(s) in a brew?

I did this back in August with a collection of lambic yeasts and other stuff and I did not make a start of any kind. Then again I was doing a 100% wild saison and wanted to see what the yeast would do. Well it took off like a rocket ship and I'm getting close to bottling.

2. How much of the cake do I need to pull out to make a starter, I want to save some to keep growing it.

I had a half pint mason jar worth half full of solid slurry. So I pitched maybe 1.5oz-2oz of shook up slurry into the 8 gal batch. This was OLD yeast though so if anything I way underpitched due to the low viability.

3. Do I use a normal DME base for a starter?

Again I didn't use a starter I just pitched directly into the fermentor and used this wild slurry as my primary yeast.

4. Dark wort or lighter, would love to make a sour blonde with half and maybe a sour stout with another portion?

Make the sour blonde and then just siphon some of the sour blonde yeast into the stout saving your little yeast collection in a jar. I shared a 1L flask worth of my saison yeast this way for a friend doing a barrel brew with some other guys. He asked for funky and I gave him funky.

Thanks all! i know there is some sach in there so I think I am going to roll with just the wild goodies and see how it turns out, just picked up 2 Jolly Pumpkin La Parcellas, so the dregs from one of those can go in as well!