Tecnnique question for building dregs up.

[mad-town dmb]

Hey all, I'm newer here but I've brewed for a while now. I've got a question.

I'm going to brew a Saison Dupont clone today and I built up dregs from 2 bottles of Dupont. Here's my method. Dregs of 1 bottle and a 200 ml starter, ferment for 2 days, add 300 ml more of wort, ferment for 2 days. Cold crash for 2 days, decant off the wort. Make a 1200ml starter with the dregs of the first batch and pitch the other bottles' dregs. Brewing today, 10 days after starting. Does my method sound good, this was my first attempt at this.

I should have enough viable yeast to get a healthy fermentation right? I think Mr Malty calls for a 1500ml starter.

Cheers
Kyle

[BrewingCooper]

Maybe it doesn't matter much, but I always have decanted off before building it up again. I wonder if the presence of alchohol (even at a lower gravity) may affect the next propogation? Either way, I'd like to skip that step in these small increments if others have had success.

[Nyakavt]

I would not add more wort at some arbitrary time, especially for the first step. If you can, take a refractometer reading to see if the beer has attenuated before adding more. If you don't have a refractometer, you could taste a small sample to see if it is no longer sweet, or check for a krausen. It can take some bottled strains a week or more to take off depending on how they were handled and how old they are. You may want to start with only 50 or 100 mL of starter wort if the sample is really old.

You don't need to crash cool and decant between steps unless you run out of room in your starter vessel. As for how much healthy yeast you're going to get, that all depends on how much you start with. The best thing to do is crash cool and get a good measurement of the slurry volume, and treat it as if you are repitching from slurry. Last time I grew up from a slant, I did 10, 50, 150, 500, 1500, 2500 mL. I'm starting with less yeast than the bottle though, so measure that slurry, and make sure it is compact before measurement. If your starter is well mixed, you can take a small sample (say 50 mL or so) and crash cool that, estimating the % yeast in that sample. There should be the same % yeast in the big starter, give or take.

[mad-town dmb]

Well guys,

I brewed Sunday and pitched at 68F with a 1200ml starter. I had very active fermentation in under 12 hours (sometime over night). It smells great and now I'm ramping it up to my finishing temp of 85F. I'll hold it there till F.G.

Cheers'
Kyle

[Beer_Punk]

I'm gonna try this out. I'm trying a similar test batch so it should be intersting.

BS!

[Beer_Punk]

Not using Saison, but 2 bottles of Lindemans Lambic, 355ml and 750ml dregs. Used purified water to rinse and combine the remnants of both bottles. I'm making a 200 ml starter for starters, if you'll excuse the pun... I'm going to let this go, and I want to step it up for enough to "taint" a one gallon test batch. It's going to be a cherry wit recipe.
I'm thinking about adding 2lb of cherries to the boil, of a 5 gal batch. Then a healthy ferment for 4 or 5 days. rack onto 2 more lbs of cherries. About a week on this. Then keg and bottle all but 1 gal or so. X-fer the last gallon into a glass vessel and pitch the grown dregs....
Any advise?