[gregdunn]

I've read a dozen or so articles on this (It's been a somewhat popular discussion on several homebrewing communities focused on using interesting/rare/"alternative" yeasts), and the beer that's been brewed so far has only used a subset of the yeast cultured from the bottles.

If they were trying to more faithfully reproduce the beer they found, they'd need to use all of the yeast cultures they recovered. (They commercial beer listed here was not actually attempting to reproduce the beer - just use the yeast)

There's some debate as to whether or not the yeast they're using is a contaminate, as well. Sacch strains do not seem to live long enough in fermented beer to make it 200+ years (though there's evidence that Brett strains will do just fine), and the samples were taken from bottles that had been decanted 20 years prior. The characteristics reported of the yeast are also similar to what many people find when using wild yeast. That might be due to them being wild yeast contaminates, or due to the selective "breeding" pressure of commercial yeasts having not yet eliminated these traits.

I wish they would sequence the yeast and release the results.