Fri Sep 30, 2011 2:20 pm
Your pellicle does not NEED to fall in order for you to bottle. If you are happy with the flavor profile of the beers than by all means package them up! At any rate, an 18 mos old sour beer will be very flat (with hardly any residual CO2 dissolved) and the brett and bacteria will be tired. Your best bet is to pitch a fresh vial of yeast, dry ale or champagne yeast to your bottling bucket to ensure proper carbonation. After waiting a year and a half you would be pretty pissed off if they never carbonated b/c you didn't add fresh yeast at bottling.
If you want to get real crazy you could pitch a fresh vial/pack of brett as your bottling yeast. Do be aware that if you choose to use an english ale strain that some will produce diacetyl upon carbonating and your bottles will take about 1 mos to clean up the diacetyl produced by the bottling yeast with aid from the brettanomyces. I do not think you would need to add a full pack of dry yeast, rather a quarter of the pack should be sufficient. I like lalvin EC-1118 champagne yeast as it can handle higher alchohol levels and acidic environments with a low pH. Plus it only costs about 1$ instead of a 4$ fermentis pack.
"A bad man is a good man's job, while a good man is a bad man's teacher."
