Does anyone have any experience with pitching the bottle dregs from Alvinne's sour beers? I had a bottle of their Sigma earlier this evening and really enjoyed it, and suspect that the "Morpheus" yeast played a big role in that. I am considering adding the dregs from another bottle of Sigma, along with a pack of Roeselare and some Hanssens Oude Gueuze dregs, to my next sour brown ale and wondered if anyone had done something similar before.
Yea, after trying Alvinne's Undressed (a sour brown) I've been thinking about saving some of the dregs because I absolutely loved it. Morpheus packs a good sour kick and is a great strain. However, I have heard that sometimes breweries will bottle with a different yeast than their proprietary one in order to avoid folks "stealing" it.. I just heard this from someone on homebrewtalk, so I'd take this with a grain of salt. I guess it couldn't hurt to throw a dreg or two from your Alvinne bottles into your next sour ale, along with the other strains and just see how it contributes to your beer.
The harvestable bottle dregs list over at The Mad Fermentationist has some of Alvinne's beers under the list of bottles with bacteria, but not Brett. My reading of that is that their dregs will have lacto but not pedio, as pedio really can't be used without Brett. Link below of you'd like to have a look. http://www.themadfermentationist.com/p/dreg-list.html?m=0
So I just heard from Marc De Keukeleire himself, and here's what he had to say: It sounds like its worth a try, especially with a fresh bottle. That's right. It's a mix of a couple of ale yeast strains and a lactobacillus culture.
Excellent, it's great when brewers are willing to provide info. You don't need to build a starter from the dregs unless it's all you're pitching. I would brew up your ale, pitch the Roeselare, a clean ale strain, and also pitch the dregs, all at the same time. Oldsock has had great success doing this, and I've got one in the fermenter I did like that.
That's more or less my plan. The only difference is that I plan on just pitching the dregs and Roeselare, not the additional clean strain, since Roeselare includes two Belgian ale yeast strains and I want to give the (reportedly) weak lacto culture a chance to do its work.
