brilliant easy wild yeast capture

so i have this buddy who, in my opinion, had a brilliant idea. he made this batch but instead of using a conventional yeast or capturing his own he threw in some unused grain. the idea was to let the yeast that are on the unused grain to ferment the batch. he told me it resulted in a crazy krausen. im very excited to use this technique. what is everyones opinion??


GH

I've done that to grow lacto bacteria. There is a fair amount of "other" stuff on the grain besides yeast. If you want to brew something sour and funky, go for it, but it's not likely you'll brew anything close to "neutral" that way.

No the idea was something funky. I love funky

You do know that beers like this will need to sit for a minimum of 6 months, correct?

This is the lambic and wild brewing forum. I am pretty sure everyone here understands that sours take a while to develop.

weirdboy said:

This is the lambic and wild brewing forum. I am pretty sure everyone here understands that sours take a while to develop.

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I've ran across folks who have not. Just trying to steer him clear of bottle bombs. No need to be rude.

You're in for a crap shoot. It is very hard to control this type if fermentation. It is best left for sour mashes where you are pre-souring the wort using the inherent lacto on the grain. You'll typically want to control the temperature to encourage certain micro-flora, and purge the volume of o2 ---- also to encourage friendly micro-flora. Left to its own devices, you'll likely end up with something tasting like vinegary baby diapers rather than a quafable beer. Have you ever accidentally left spent grain sitting around for a couple days?

I've had some VERY boring commercial lambics. Nothing funky or wild about them, really.

I agree with wonderbread. There's a chance you'll make something better than you would with commercial yeast, but there's a better chance you'll make something pretty nasty.

From my own wild yeast experiments, I haven't been impressed with the flavor from wild yeast. The average Belgian or British yeast has a lot more character than any of the wild yeasts I've captured.

i do love sours. i have made quite a few. what i am looking for is a wild yeast without the "leaving wort outside with cheese cloth covering it." i thought this would be great alternative. its just another way of contracting the use of a wild type of yeast being summer. has anyone else tried this method and what results have you had? this could be another way of developing a house strain of yeast with souring bacteria. perhaps a truly wild brew.

greyhoundbrewing said:

so i have this buddy who, in my opinion, had a brilliant idea. he made this batch but instead of using a conventional yeast or capturing his own he threw in some unused grain. the idea was to let the yeast that are on the unused grain to ferment the batch. he told me it resulted in a crazy krausen. im very excited to use this technique. what is everyones opinion??
GH

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Tried this last month, didn't get any good comments, "Always came out tasting like puke.. . . . I was never able to salvage a beer from something like this". I ain't sceerd, I haven't tasted it yet but here's a pic:

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That looks delicious!