Lambic style beer with dregs only?

[D-Train]

I found a 375 of Drie Fonteinen intense red kriek on a recent California trip. I think the bottle date was somewhere between 1 and 2 years old. Immediately after consumption I added a low gravity wort to the bottle w/ the dregs, added an airlock, and let it ferment for a couple of weeks. Then I made another low gravity wort, gently poured the original bottle into a 750, topped off with the wort, put on the airlock, and let it ferment for a couple of weeks. I tasted it between the step up and it was great, very similar to the original beer but granted I did leave a lot of dregs (1 inch?) which I'm sure contributed. Both steps took a few days before fermentation kicked off but it looked healthy and active.

I want to make a beer with what I have.

What would you recommend and why?
a) pitch the 750 and rely on it for primary and souring?
b) pitch the 750 with fresh lab yeast? If yes what strain?
c) step up to 1/2 gallon, and then pitch it for primary and souring?
d) step up to 1/2 gallon, and then pitch with fresh lab yeast? If yes what strain?
e) mystery option? Please explain.

I'd like to do a) or c) but have no experience with dregs only.

Thanks.

 

[ColoHox]

I vote for A as well. Toss the culture in and forget about the fermenter for a long time.

 

[Rivenin]

i'd step it up a bit if you can... but either way should be fine.
i ended up doing a coolship type thing in my garage, adding dregs of about 1/2 a dozen sour beers and took off crazily about 3 days later and needed a blow off

 

[stpug]

I vote for A as well. Toss the culture in and forget about the fermenter for a long time.

^^I would do the exact same thing.... possibly for a very looong time.

 

[D-Train]

Alright A it is!

See you in a couple of years :rockin:

 

[Agate]

The only problem with pitching the dregs is that they are the only surviving microbes at the end of a long fermentation. The ones that started fermentation are long since gone, and without them you don't necessarily have the precursors in the wort that allowed these resilient microbes to create the flavors that they did. In fact, those are probably not the species that accounted for most of the attenuation.

It'll probably be great if you just pitched the dregs, but if it were me I would add a nice estery saison strain.

 

[m00ps]

yeah you'll likely need some kind of sacch or brett strain to ensure complete fermentation. Most bacteria are not capable of fermenting wort alone

 

[ColoHox]

Chances are high that the dregs contain some yeast.

 

[Agate]

Sure, at a minimum there should be some perfectly healthy brett in there. Just wouldn't necessarily count on the sacch being viable.

 

[Calder]

Pitch what you have, with saison yeast.

You want to make sure you start with a sacc yeast and the brett is a slower secondary yeast.

 

[TNGabe]

If I'm remembering correctly from the papers on lambic fermentation that I've read, there isn't much, if any, sacchromyces involved in the first place. Although it's correct that some of the organisms involved in the initial fermentation of the lambic are not alive in the bottled product, that doesn't mean you need to pitch yeast with the dregs. One 375ml bottles isn't much to start with and growing up the dregs is going to skew the population ratios, but as we've established that population isn't representative of the entire fermentation of lambic, changing the ratios might not matter. I've had luck pitching just dregs from multiple bottles into a 5 gallons batch and then a few months later using that as the 'starter' for a barrel ferment. The end product is about as close to lambic as homebrew gets, but YMMV.

 

[Agate]

Don't disagree with you, but I had this in mind when I wrote the above comment:
http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/317.html

 

[sweetcell]

another vote here for a small pitch of belgian yeast along with those dregs.

 

[D-Train]

I finally found the time to brew this a couple of days ago. 61/36/3 belgian pilsner / raw wheat / acidulated to OG 1.050. I used the turbid mash schedule from themadfermentationist. Hopped to 10 IBU's with 1.5oz. hallertau at 1.7% aa and boiled for almost 3 hours.

I decanted a small glass of the 3F starter for tasting but otherwise pitched the entire 750ml. There was just a very thin cake so this is a massive underpitch compared to what I'm used to. 48 hours later now and no sign of activity. Once it gets going I will probably pitch a little bit of yeast off a starter of WYeast 3726 for diversity but I wanted to give the brett and bugs a head start to up their counts.

The starter tasted awesome and was down to 3.5 pH. Oh yeah, temp controller is at 63 so this is cool and another reason for the slow start.

 

[D-Train]

First sampling of this beer tonight after a 7+ month wait. No gravity reading or pH reading, but I have to say it's coming out exactly as I would have liked. Awesome aroma and taste that takes me back to the 3F bottle which was the source of bugs and yeast. I'll give this more time to make sure it reaches terminal gravity but from a flavor and acidity perspective it's ready.

 

[worlddivides]

In the end, how much did you build up the starter from the dregs before pitching them? Sounds like it must've been a pretty potent combination.

Don't disagree with you, but I had this in mind when I wrote the above comment:
http://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/317.html

Awesome article. Just fascinating. I had no idea there was any lager yeast in lambics.

Although I was a little surprised that the writer wrote this:

and then they are replaced by Pediococcus damnosus. This is another bacteria that eats sugar and produces lactic acid. Curiously, it also produces diacetly, but I can't recall ever tasting that in lambic.

And the answer was staring him in the face in the chart and several sentences he wrote below:

Dekkera bruxellensis

 

[D-Train]

In the end, how much did you build up the starter from the dregs before pitching them? Sounds like it must've been a pretty potent combination.

I pitched the 750mL starter. It was only stepped up one time. It could have used another step-up because I had no krausen or visible yeast fermentation after a week, just a nice pellicle. Thinking it was a massive yeast underpitch at that point I did add a small amount of WY3726 to kick off a fermentation. So technically at this point it's not a "dregs only" beer, but at least all of the bacteria and brett is dregs only.