What is the deal with reusing sour blends sach & bugs? If you leave a beer on them for a while and rack to the secondary can you immediately throw another beer on the cake to get another going (with good/expected output)? Will the first beer continue to sour off the cake? How many generations could you get out of them? Anybody feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Pitching onto a yeast cake is never a good idea. It will always be overpitching by quite a lot. Some people like to rinse the trub like they would with any sacc strain. I've just been repitching the trub as rinsing will change the composition of the blend and potentially lose the less floculant organisms. I don't think this is the only way or even the best way, it's just how I do it. I like to save the trub from the first or maybe 2nd beer I make and only re-pitch that. If you continue to re-pitch over several generations, the bacterial population will become dominant and the resulting beer unpleasantly acidic. Peter Bouckaert is quoted in Wild Brews about how Rodenbach would wash there yeast in acid (as compared to homebrew yeast rinsing in water) to control the bacteria over succesive generations, but that's not an option for most of us.
