Doing it right? Primitive yeast catching?

Alright. Since I'm a viking age reenactor, I've been experimenting with some iron age brews for a little while. This summer I'm also working as a guide on a reconstructed Viking farmstead.

The thing is that I'd like to do a brew as primitive as I can get, without too much fuss. That is, I'm going to make gruit ale with stone-ground malt and self-picked herbs, and ferment it in a wooden bucket.

I've been wondering what yeast I should use, and figured I should try to catch my own. I've been reading around a bit on the forums, and surfed the web for resources, but I'm still a bit confused.

First I put a glass with a mixture of water, honey and a little bit of flour by an open window. Then I figured maybe some elderflowers in the mix could hasten the process. Then again today I found some unripe apples, I took some of the skin and threw it into the glass as well. Now I'm just waiting. I figure the pollen and the appleskin, as well as the flour might contain wild yeast spores? Is there anything I should do differently?

the apple will also most likely contain other things as well, the only time Ive gotten an unwanted pedio infection was when I used fresh apples in brew, mmmmm butter

I would just use a normal ale yeast, I mean yes things were rustic, but they still understood to skim yeast to start a new batch quicker etc

before you add your "House mid" i would let it finish out and taste it, do you want your whole batch to have this flavor? and remember that any sour/funky flavors will be more pronounced in the full batch

Sounds like a cool idea though

also, try to use spruce branches to lauter through

I agree, I'm sure most households had some culture they had been saving and using from batch to batch, so maybe I'll just use some ale yeast in the start and just keep going with my wild yeast experiment in small scale untill I'm sure I have something satisfactory.

Today when I came home from work I found that something was afoot in the glass!

All the flowers which had been slowly sinking to the bottom now suddenly had risen to the surface again. Also there was some pure white foam along the edges of the glass. I added just a little bit of honey to it after removing most of the skins and flowers.