Priming sugar for sour beer

[nigel_c]

I have a demijohn of beer with Orval dregs put by for a year now and I'm now thinking about bottling it. Gravity is down to 1.006 and tastes delicious.
Is the priming the same for sour beers? Have never done one before. I would have thought slightly less priming sugar would be needed as the high attenuation of the yeasties and beasties? All advice welcome.

[matthewdick23]

im not sure that it'd be different, but check with others

obvs ull want fresh yeast too

im doin a quad this month with some russian river dregs. cant wait!!

[mr hoppy]

With Orval dregs, rather than sour bugs you have brett. The issue with brett is that it will eat dextrins that normal brewers' yeast won't. However, after a year it will have eaten most of those, so you should prime as usual - brett or sacch will eat the simple priming sugars just the same. If you are trying to achieve something like Orval you probably want to use more priming sugar - there's 4 volumes of C02 in Orval.

Of course, if you were bottling a beer with brett in it after just a couple of weeks in the primary, especially if you had mashed high you'd probably need a lot less priming sugar. The trick is to check your FG - if it's down around say 1006 and it hasn't moved for a while you are not likely to get bottle bombs, provided you use decent, strong bottles in the first place.

There's good discussions of this kind of thing on the Burgundian Babble Belt site.