Sour Yeast Strain.

Yeast largely isn’t responsible for the tartness, it’s the bacteria.

Most ‘sour’ beers have a cocktail of sacc, Brett, and bacteria strains that produce the flavor the brewer and blender are looking for.
It really depends what you are interested in. The flavor profile of a Flanders red is quite different from a gueuze.

The dregs will probably work fine, or you could just purchase some unpasteurized sours from a store and dump their dregs in.

For a ready-to-pitch option, I’ve always been a fan of wyeast 3763, but there are many options our there and more now than ever before!

 

The wyeast strain i mentioned has a Belgian Ale strain, 2 Brett strains, 2 bacteriae strains and even a sherry yeast. It is great for Flanders reds and browns. Your typical bottle of commercial sour will likely contain those and many more strains. You could also buy individual yeast and bacteria strains and have more control of the flavor, but that is neither cheap, nor traditional.

The yeast and bugs are only half of it. Your brewing recipe and techniques will decide how the beer turns out.

Turbid mashes, aged hops, etc. are all ways to imitate one style or another.
Some people ferment with a clean ale yeast first, then transfer and pitch bugs. This results in a different and perhaps less complex ‘wild’ profile, but contains your contamination in one vessel.
Oak is another thing you might want to look into.

It’s a whole different way of brewing. Get ready to do a lot of research!

 

No problem! I’ve been brewing these types of beers for years and have learned so much and learn something new everyday!

Sparrow’s book and Tonsmiere’s book and blog are good. Interviews and articles from Vinnie and Tomme are always must-hear. Peter Bouckaert and Jean van Roy are also very free with valuable information.

The three pieces of advice I would give are:

Be patient! These beers take time to develop and although one may taste great at 9 months, it can be otherworldly at 24.

Be extra cautious with sanitation. Separate the clean stuff. Hoses, buckets, everything. Use neon duct tape and sharpies to indicate ‘sour’ tools. Everything plastic, wood, or porous should never go back to clean beer when it touches sours. If you want to cross-use glass and stainless, familiarize yourself with heat sterilization, caustic cleaners, and other extreme cleanliness methods.

Finally, brewing is only half the battles. The magic is often made in blending.

Good luck!

 

Be careful when primary fermenting with dregs you harvest from bottles.. there’s a good chance they bottle with a wine strain which you don’t necessarily want fermenting all your worst and if you Co Pitch it with another sacc strain most likely it will kill it, or at least cause some random issues. That being said no reason you can’t secondary ferment with it. Just depends on what you want to do and what you harvested.

There are so many different ways to do it. You can primary with any sacc strain from 001,002, Saison, lager yeast, etc. You can pitch bacteria, wild yeast during primary, before pitch of sacc, in secondary, etc.

For me the best source of info has been listening to the Sour Hour on the Brewing Network. Pretty sure I’ve listened to all 70 or so episodes and a few of them more than once. So much great info from so many great sources.

I’ve only just begun brewing mixed fermentation beers (kettle Sours notwithstanding) but so excited to start brewing a bunch more. Got my first one going now that is based off a Grisette I’ve brewed before. Pils/Spelt 4%. Mashed super high, fermented warm with 3522, finished kinda high at 1.010. Split half into 3g carboy, and pitched HF dregs I harvested from a couple of their standard “Farmstead” beers and an expired bottle of Brett Brux from the Yeast Bay. Almost two months later and gravity is down to 1.005 and tasting great. So hard not to just keg it now!

Has anyone here tried to go the route of intentionally creating a Diacetyl bomb in primary then pitching a mixed culture in secondary to see what flavors the Brett converts the Diacetyl into? I believe Drake’s does this and I know NB primaries with a lager yeast at a warm temp.

 

If you can find any crooked stave in your area I've had a lot of luck with their surrette and Colorado wild sage beers to use in secondary on a sour. Not only do you get some great mixed cultures from their bottles but you also have a few tasty brews to enjoy as well!

Another way you could do it is get a small 200 mL starter going with each of these dregs in the bottles with foil over the opening. That will give them a kick start for when to add to secondary

 

Not sure if you can, really... I just know CS doesn't bottle with any sort of other bottle conditioning yeasts so I knew what I was growing was the brett strain, and the lacto/pedio. Do you know for sure that the dregs you are harvesting contain champagne yeast? If you don't use this as the primary strain and add to secondary you will still probably get the other bacteria, but you want to make sure it's not a 'killer' strain first

 

From a Vinnie presentation, “be prepared to dump some beer”.

 

No real way to know what you’re growing unless you can plate it out probably. You could ask the breweries you harvested from if they use a wine yeast for bottling? Wine yeast only kills sacc that’s susceptible (most brewing yeasts) though so you’ll still get at least some Brett and/or bacteria. If it is a killer strain it doesn’t matter in secondary. You’ve already completed primary fermentation so you don’t need the yeast you started with anymore and the wine yeast won’t attenuate your beer anymore if primary was complete as wine yeast can’t eat maltotriose (this is why it’s used as a bottling yeast). So even though you might be growing it up it can’t do anything as it has no food.

Honestly using what you harvested in secondary is a great way to go. Depending on what you pitch, what you harvested, and how you ferment, you can get acidity rather quickly but it can take time for things to come together to make a good beer. Brew a Saison of sorts with your favorite Belgian yeast then transfer it into a glass carboy or split it into two (fill them as much as you can, air can be the enemy) and pitch your grown up dregs and/or some lab cultures and see what happens. Give it a few months before you check gravity/taste. If you want acidity be aware of you hopping rates. Although dregs will/can create acidity faster than some lab cultures as often the lacto cultures the breweries have get really strong over time.

Check out Dr Lambic’ blog too. He has some good info on fast souring if you want acidity quickly (not kettle souring).

 

There used to be a list of viable bottle dregs floating around on the mad fermentationist or milk the funk. Personally I wouldn't rely solely on dregs to do the job, but rather add them to a good commercial pitch to add complexity.

 

Lots of great advice here already. All I can really contribute to it is, "Read the Milk the Funk wiki". It's the best source for sour beer brewing on the planet and it is cross-referenced and cited.

 

https://www.themadfermentationist.com/p/dreg-list.html

That's certainly one way to do it, but dregs by themselves certainly work just fine.

That said, I wouldn't ONLY pitch the dregs. I'd pitch them into a starter first and let them get active and multiply.

 

Matt's blog is great:

http://sourbeerblog.com/

Don't know how much time that he'll be putting into it now that he's opening Mellow Mink, but the information that's already there is stellar.

 

True, but not as true in a homebrewing environment. Ambient inoculation and long term aging in wood make it much truer, though.

 

Though, in general, killer strains only affect the same species that are killer factor sensitive, the situation is decently more complicated than that.

Many wine strains are maltose negative, as well.