I have pulled some yeast from a bottle of Tank 7. My question is two fold. One, how long is it viable for? and two, what strain is it?
How long it is viable for depends on the health of the yeast. How long ago was it bottled? Did you make a starter with the dregs? Not sure what strain they use for primary fermentation for Tank 7 (similar to 3711 in my opinion) but they filter and centrifuge after fermentation and pitch another yeast (t-58) for bottle conditioning, so your dregs are Safbrew T‑58.
I've made one beer with T-58, will bottle another soon. The first beer came out great. Temperature for fermentation was a bit variable, but not too hot (it was in my room, not in my fermentation freezers), still came out good.
The dregs in a Smokestack beer are not t-58. They are a champagne yeast from Lallemand, DV-10. I would not suggest using dregs from any Smokestack for primary fermentation.
Terribly sorry that I just saw this. We don't share the exact strain used, but I would suggest using a high gravity trappist strain to approximate our house Belgian yeast.
I appreciate you coming on here and sharing info, it's great to see a brewer from my favorite American brewery helping us little guys do it right.
This info would have come in handy about 3 years ago when I decided to get back into homebrewing after a long lay-off. I brewed a clone of Double Wide that I found on another forum, and built up a starter from a Double Wide bomber to ferment it out. Holy shit, that beer sucked (the attenuation wasn't that bad, though).
Hah! I wonder how many people, myself included, have had good luck culturing yeast, only to find out the bad ones sucked because it was just a bottle conditioning strain, and not the main strain used to ferment with.
My problem was that I remembered growing up some yeast from a bottle of chimay, and then brewing one of my best beers probably 15 years earlier. I'm sure that beer sucked, too, but I thought it was good at the time. I just figured it would work with any bottle conditioned beer.
