I just bought a growler of Alvinne/Stillwater Wild West, which is a delicious sour beer. I don't think I can find any bottles of it. So my question is, if I want to culture up the microbes from the beer, could I use some amount of the beer in my growler in lieu of using bottle dregs? Or is the cell count too low for that to be feasible? (Or is it a bad idea for some other reason?) Thanks in advance for any advice.
I'd say it would less likely you'd end up with salvageable yeast because the beer was kegged and not bottle conditioned. I'm not speaking from experience.
I would also have the same thought. Not to mention the growler might not have been 100% free of contamination either. You could try making a starter though, what is there to lose?
In theory, yes, but it sounds tough. If you try it, I'd like to hear how it turned out. You will have better luck with bacteria than yeast because they multiply so fast. This also means yeast from the initial fermentation will be under-represented in your starter... you'd want to start fermentation with another yeast and add the bugs after a few days.
I've had no problem propagating saison & hefe strains from beers that were carbonated in bright tanks then bottled on a line. The dregs should have some sour strains in it, the biggest problem with four blends being that they propagate at different rates so the starter that you make has a different ratio of bugs than the original beer was inoculated with...
So I'm reviving this thread because in fact I cultured some beer from my growler of Alvinne Wild West, and after a while the culture smelled great. So I've been feeding it and keeping it in a dark, temperature-controlled area, but otherwise leaving it unmolested. Now I want to use it, but this raises a question: what is in it? Purportedly Wild West is fermented with Morpheus yeast and then aged in barrels. I've also seen reference to lactobacillus in Alvinne beers, but not specifically this beer. The sample I cultured up looks as though it has a pellicle, but honestly it is hard to tell what is going on in there. If I had to guess I would say it probably has brett and pediococcus in it, but who knows? I am asking mostly because I don't know what to expect if I use these bugs. If it has brett and pedio, then I expect I will have to age the beer for a long time. If, on the other hand, it's just yeast and lacto, then maybe it will be ready to drink much sooner. Other than that, I guess it doesn't matter too much... if it does to my beer what it did to my starter wort, the results should be delicious. But I welcome any thoughts people have. [To flesh out my thoughts a little: if the beer was aged in barrels, then it probably has brett in it, right? Even if Alvinne never actively pitched any brett, it should have picked it up (along with a lot of other microbes) in the barrel... or so I assume?]
