Bottling Sour Ales - Using Champagne Yeast

It depends. Make sure that you don't use a "killer yeast" which is a strain of wine/champagne yeast that excretes an enzyme which kills all competitors. This type of strain would kill the bacteria and Brett in the bottles. As long as you don't use one of these strains you will be fine. In future re-pitches of the dregs the champagne yeast won't be able to grow to a sufficient cell population in time to ferment the wort. The brewer's yeast (or mixed cultures) you use in those sours will do the bulk of the fermentation and the dregs from this current sour will add bacteria and Brett that will grow in numbers sufficient to do their business. The champagne goes after simpler sugars (like priming sugar) so it won't really impact the sours you are making as it is heavily out competed for the simple sugar by the brewer's yeast.

 

Just bottled a batch that was a year old using lalvin 1118 and have had them sitting in my temp controlled freezer @ 70 degrees and after two weeks they are almost fully Carbed and tasting great. This beer I made was a 5 gallon batch lambic split with raspberries on one batch and blueberries on the other batch. Added numerous bottle dregs over the year long period. Just popped one yesterday and like I said it's almost fully carbonated after two weeks.

 

What I did was I pitched the yeast into the bottling bucket. The dregs in the carboy did not receive the priming sugar or the priming yeast charge. This seemed to work very well, and my next Flanders Red is happily underway.

Edit, I see now you mean the dregs from the bottles, not the fermenter. I decided saving the carboy dregs would be sufficient for my purposes.

 

Russian River uses a killer wine strain for bottling. Lots of breweries do. Brett and bacteria aren't "sensitive" to the kill factor, so it is really just an issue for the brewer's yeast (and there isn't much of it left by that point).

 

Good info! Do you have a 'go-to' to re-yeast bottles?

 

Good to know, I'm sure I read that in some book some where recently and must have forgotten about it. Thanks for the correction.

 

Champagne yeast usually, Premier Cuvee or the like. Haven't noticed a huge difference in the results.

 

Use this: http://www.danstaryeast.com/products/cbc-1-cask-and-bottle-conditioned-beer-yeast

"CBC-1 has been especially selected for it's refermentation properties and is recommended for Cask and Bottle Conditioning. CBC-1 referments beers up to 12-14% ABV due to its high resistance to alcohol and pressure; it does not produce flavors therefore conserving the original character of the beer."

 

I've added "young" yeast from a different sour before, not added any fresh yeast, and added champagne yeast. They all carbonate, some methods just take longer then others.