Recommendations on bottle dregs in secondary

Do you want just Brett or bacteria as well? What's your TG with the 3711?

Just Brett (Orval, LA Carnevale, Bruery Saison Lente), you could leave it for 2-4 months in secondary.
Bacteria (Any Jolly Pumpkin, 3F, Cantillon, RR), I'd leave for longer so it can sour. 6 months to a year.

Prime as usual (BY WEIGHT) once finished with secondary and you have a stable TG.

 

I've had great luck using JP Bam Bier in my Brett Saison's. I use WLP670 Farmhouse Blend (Supposed to be LA strain) and once that finishes I pitch the bottle dregs and let that sit for at least 90 days.

 

So just Brett. Sure, the Brett will continue to work for years, even in the bottle, albeit slowly. You can secondary for a few months, then prime to the low end of the spectrum, say 2-ish vol CO2, if planning on aging for a while. If you're going to drink quickly, I wouldn't worry and would prime as usual.

 

“I'm very interested in adding bottle dregs to a 1 gallon batch.” Just a point of clarification, you will be conducting your secondary in 1 gallon vessels?

Cheers!

 

“is it recommended to use separate equipment when handling brett? I know with lacto, for example, it is highly recommended to use a different bottling bucket, siphon, vessel, etc.”

I have brewed two batches using Brett. When I brewed my first batch I sent an e-mail to Michael Tonsmiere (the MadFermentationist and BA @OldSock) and he recommended that I do not reuse any soft tubing (I use soft tubing for bottling) after it has been exposed to Brett. I have followed that advice for my two Brett related batches and I personally have not experienced any cross contamination issues. It seems to me that if you practice good sanitation in your homebrewing process that any Brett that has contacted your homebrewing equipment (e.g., primary fermenter, etc.) will get eliminated.

For the sake of completeness I should report that I have read in later BA posts where Michael Tonsmiere has recommended that homebrewers have separate dedicated equipment for brewing with Brett.

Hopefully @rocdoc1 will chime in with his homebrewing experiences in this regard.

Cheers!

 

I have separate plastics (not including airlocks) for funky vs. clean beers. All tubing, thief, bottling bucket, bottling wand, funnel for secondary use. Just retire your current stuff and buy a new set for your clean beers. You probably need to change out anyway. I ferment all funky beers in glass.

 

I brewed my first brett beer many years ago, and since then I've made no effort to separate my equipment into 2 piles. I do have a tap dedicated to sour or brett beers, but if I happen to have a sour and a brett kegged I'll just use whichever tap is unoccupied. Can I say that this is the best policy? Absolutely not, but my own personal experience has been that over the past 10 or 12 years I've never experienced an unintended infection.
My favorite anecdote is that I converted a crappy pale ale into malt vinegar IN THE KEG, a process that took over a year in my garage. After I bottled the vinegar, I cleaned the keg with PBW, sanitized it with iodophor and put that keg back into the pile of empties in the beer room. Since then that keg has probably had 200 gallons of homebrew served from it and I've never had an infected batch. Again I would never recommend doing this, but out of ignorance 20 years ago I did it and got away with it.