For sure. There was this one guy who recently emailed us — he heard Tim on a podcast mention that we have our mixed cultures banked at GigaYeast just in case we ever needed to use it. He thought that he could go ahead and buy it from them and wanted to make sure we were okay with that before he went ahead and did it. Of course, that’s not the case. We said no, you can’t do that, but that you can probably get bottle dregs from our bottles and get the same results. We’re seeing a lot of breweries borrowing cultures from one another, and there’s a risk that you’re going to end up with very similar flavor profiles as a result if breweries are just dropping these dregs into their own beers without making any changes to it. That would be unfortunate. If people are playing with cultures, adding to them, that’s how you develop new flavors in yeast.

We encourage people to work with our yeast. If you look at commercial breweries that use the same commercial strains of yeast, they get different results based on their technique, their brewing system, their water, so I’m not too concerned that there's another place that will take our house flavor away. But it would be unfortunate if people stopped being inventive with yeast and bacteria. Our culture comes from years and years and years of collecting different bottle dregs, and building them up, and tasting them, selecting for things we like. I’d hope that people continue to do that rather than just try to make funky beers by buying a commercial strain.