Sour beers

[nigel_c]

I've done a few sour beers, the best one is coming good now after about a year and a half. It was a basic wheat beer with the dregs of 2 or 3 Orval bottles in a demi batch. I have some Alt beer (demi again) with wlp655 belgian sour mix that is 5 minths ols now that is only starting to show signs of sourness.

Anybody have any success souring with dregs from commercial bottles and if so which ones. Have a few demi's coming empty soon enough and might just split a batch and compare strains.
Or as a worst case scenario can be a starter for a barrel project.

[mr hoppy]

Everything I've read suggests that commercial dregs are much more aggressive than the Wyeast / White Labs equivalents, but at this point my experience with them is fairly limited.

I'm on my 3rd Orval clone using T-58 dry yeast and dregs from Orval bottles. I've also done a gose (German sour wheat beer) using S-33 dry yeast and WLP 670 (lactobacillus) as the souring agent. http://www.nationalhomebrewclub.com/forum/index.php/topic,2329.0.html  I also innoculated a couple of bottles of the gose with Cantillon dregs. I've not tasted any of the bottles with Cantillon dregs yet but they threw a serious amount of sediment after.

A thing I've noticed with Orval dregs is that you want there to be something left for it to consume when you've completed the primary ferment. The brett in Orval should ferment down to 1006 to 1008 so if you can mash high so that your main fermentation finishes somewhere above that it should help you get brett character.

In my limited experience you should get a good Orval character (rather than out and out sour) in six months. In fact brett activity is supposed to peak after about 100 days. I've tended to pitch the dregs into a secondary carboy and only bottle once the Orval character is evident so that I can dry hop toward the end.

[mr hoppy]

Have you read this post on the Mad Fermentationist blog?

http://www.themadfermentationist.com/2010/06/harvesting-sour-beer-bottle-dregs.html

The Burgundian Babble Belt is also a good place to look for discussion on this kind of topic.