I’m about to transfer a split batch of Flanders Red Ale to secondary fermenters, and wanted to know if anyone has had success with repitching these types of blended products (WYeast #3763 or #3278)? Would one work better than the other? My plan was to was mix the yeast cakes with some sterile water, let stand for 15 min and then decant off the upper layer (~80% of the entire volume). I’d then pitch this into a Flanders Brown Ale (OG 1.070). Just seems a waste to just dump this mix of yeast and bugs down the drain.
I had a very successful solara project in which I kept adding wort to a carboy with a pretty thick slurry of yeast and stuff on the bottom. Occasionally I would use a wine thief to remove some of the beer for bottling, mostly for competitions. It worked well and won several medals. Eventually the thickness of the trub at the bottom reached an inch or so and made me nervous about autolysis, so I transferred the beer to another carboy and threw the trub away. Fortunately there were enough bugs in the transferred beer that it made a nice pelicle right away. I now have two of these projects going, one with bugs from several commercial sour beers and one with Bret B. I add partially fermented wort to them every so often and blend them to taste. It’s interesting and kinda fun.
I don’t know if the above helps with your scenario though, but I’d keep the blend and pitch it for sure.
I ( and most other sour beer brewers) find that you actually get better results by repitching. The commercial blends are always a little bland on the first generation, but by about the 3rd you start to get a much better result. More sourness, more funk, and in shorter time. By all means, repitch the bugs - they like it.