Dregs potentially with bottling yeast

[toddk63]

I have bottle of homebrewed lambic from a friend. I would like to add the dregs of this bottle into my solera. If the bottle has had bottling yeast added, is there any risk to my solera by adding this. I cannot ask the brewer as he is deceased, but I have always loved his lambics so would like to add that character to mine.

Thanks,

Todd K.

 

[VikeMan]

I have bottle of homebrewed lambic from a friend. I would like to add the dregs of this bottle into my solera. If the bottle has had bottling yeast added, is there any risk to my solera by adding this.

Depends on what you mean by risk. Does your solera not already contain at least one Saccharomyces strain? So you'd just be (maybe) adding another clean strain along with the dregs' bugs, and might not ever notice a difference from it . How particular are you about trying to maintain a sort of balance between all the microbes currently in your solera?

 

[toddk63]

Depends on what you mean by risk. Does your solera not already contain at least one Saccharomyces strain? So you'd just be (maybe) adding another clean strain along with the dregs' bugs, and might not ever notice a difference from it . How particular are you about trying to maintain a sort of balance between all the microbes currently in your solera?

My main concern was introducing some type of "killer" yeast. For example I bottle my sours with EC-1118

 

[mashpaddled]

I wouldn't worry about it, personally. The number of cells of bottling yeast in one bottle is not going to be a lot. Killer strains are all wine yeast which are generally not great at fermenting malt sugars. They will have a hard time competing themselves in that environment. The less they can metabolize from the available sugars, the less they have energy to expend releasing killer enzymes. Additionally, those strains are not competitive with brett, other oxidative yeast, or LAB, so your risk is only that the bottling yeast is competing with the other sacc strains in there.