Cooking is my second favorite hobby, and I've recently been experimenting with sourdough breads and sourdough starters. I've made a "from scratch" starter over a 5 day period mixing flour and water, letting set/ferment in a warm environment for 24 hours then discarding half and adding more flour and water and letting cook some, shortening the discarding and feeding periods to 12 hours after the third day. Anyway, I've ended up with some decently active starter from which I've made a few decent loaves of bread. Not as sour as I'm going for, but I'm still learning. I've been wondering if anyone here as tried to use one of these starters to make an ale? The little yeastie beasties seem aggressive as hell, and it doesn't seem they'd have any problem fermenting worts from malted grains. Is this worth and experiment – perhaps on a 2-3 gallon SMASH ale?
I feel like Old Sock, aka "The Mad Fermentationist," did something along these lines. Perhaps search his blog, or maybe he'll post.
Of course it worth the experiment...but it is wild bread yeast after all...don't expect too much...but you never know.
I want to put a disclaimer that I am not, repeat NOT, being a smart ass and bringing this up for laughs. The guy who was using his turkey roast pan as a coolship brought this up and actually did it. His reports back equated to undrinkable beer. EDIT: Again, not being a smart ass.
A different one. That guy had some out of the box ideas for homebrewing, but it sounds like they were terrible. If I wasn't lazy I would look it up... but meh.
The flour/water mixture where the yeast starter developed was covered during the development, so the yeast arose from elements in the flour itself I'd guess. I don't know whether you'd call that yeast wild or not. What is tame yeast? ;-)
homemade sour dough is pretty common here...the Amish Bread my wife makes might be a possibility, too. It's pretty simple: cup of flour, cup of milk, cup of sugar (covered, like you said). I guess it depends how it's stored whether the yeast is local or not.
If I had to make a sourdough, and I will someday, I'd follow Chef John. He takes about a week to fulfill a loaf. I'd expect a fermentation to be incredibly slow. Here's a link and I suggest if you like cooking to check out the rest of his stuff too: http://foodwishes.blogspot.com/2008/03/follow-sourdough-day-1-can-you-say.html
Thanks for your comment and the link. It looks like a great sourdough reference in general. I just took a glance, but it appears is method is close to what I used to make the starter. And, yes it takes about a week to get good action in that starter. Once it get's going, though, it's pretty aggressive.
with sourdough your waiting for the culture to break down the starch to something that can be fermented. If you added that to wort (easy to eat sugar) I'd guess it would go a lot faster. Whether or not it would taste good is another story. You could do a 1gal batch easy enough though, and if it was good use that as a yeast culture for a bigger batch
I like this idea well enough, but I'd make a 6 gal batch and pull a gallon to the side for this Frankenstein. I'm a man of little patience.
I've heard of several people doing it but never heard anybody say it made great beer. I suspect the bad flavor culprit is the sacc species that ferments starch. Weihenstephan and Boston Beer Co. explored the idea of using it for their collaboration beer but Weihenstephan told Koch it produces foul beer. I have an isolated strain myself but I've never tried brewing with it. What am I going to discover about brewing that Weihenstephan doesn't already know?
