13,700
edits
Changes
no edit summary
Beer or wort can be inoculated with any commercial (and homebrewed) sour/wild/funky beer that is not kettle soured or pasteurized. Dregs can be used from many types of sour/wild/mixed fermented commercial beers (as long as they are not kettle sours or pasteurized), including [[Mixed_Fermentation|mixed fermentation]] sour beers where the microbes that the brewery used are from a yeast lab, wild-fermented beers that use [[Wild_Yeast_Isolation|wild-caught or bioprospected microorganisms]], Belgian [[lambic]] and non-lambic sour beers that are [[Spontaneous_Fermentation|spontaneously fermented]] in a coolship, beers that are co-fermented with [[Brettanomyces_and_Saccharomyces_Co-fermentation|''Saccharomyces'' and ''Brettanomyces'']], etc. Generally, only the last half inch of a bottle's contents, including the sediment, is used. This portion of the beer is often referred to as "the bottle dregs". It is recommended that the microbes in the beer are first reinvigorated with a small starter wort of around 1.030 gravity before it is added to the fermentation vessel. Using commercial sour beers to ferment is generally a good idea because the microbes are often stronger and more aggressive from commercial breweries as compared to mixed cultures from yeast companies (this is a generalization; smaller and more specialized yeast labs offer very aggressive alternative yeast and bacteria strains). It is generally advised to use as fresh of a bottle of commercial sour beer as possible, however, older bottles can be used as well depending on the brewery, the microbes in the beer, and how the bottle was stored.
==General Methods and Uses==