Ambient/Spontaneous Fermentation

On the subject of cleaner yeast, such as for apfelwein, toss some fresh, unwashed, preferably not too recently sprayed with anything too poisonous, ripe grapes (IIRC stems and all is better?) into a starter. Or any other fruit in a similar state, on which the yeast will probably be somewhat different. As best I recall, this was the standard method of making wine for a VERY long time - and the timing (ripeness) is important, as they yeast are either not there, or not ready, or not the right kind at other times (research I read but don't have a reference to stored - examining yeast found on grape stems at various times leading up to and beyond harvest)

Landhoney probably has busyness going on with life, having evidently moved from Maryland to West Palm. FL, given the location mentioned at the start of this thread and the one currently reported in the profile.

does anyone know landhoney outside of this forum? call him up and get him to update this thread!

landhoney said:

my new homebrew club( in Wash D.C. ~1 hour away), but were not at the first meeting I attended.

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Which club?

bump Landhoney?

landhoney hasn't been here since 5/31. Several of us have tried emailing him and calling.

he done moved to flo-rida or some sh*t. he probably got really sick from some kind of infected beverage

This is for the poster asking/commenting on using wild yeast for wines...This is how the winery I work for does most of their wines and has plans to go 100% wild/native yeast. We basically take a big tub full of grapes and stomp on them and then let the yeasties do there thing for a week or so then inoculate this starter into the tanks.

Bummer... I was hoping for the verdict, just like everyone else I guess.

I started a "wild" starter today. Lacking and orchard or a vineyard, I mashed wild blackberries from the yard in sugar water with some nutrient. I'll be pitching the cake. We'll see...

Is this like "The Ring"? Maybe you will be the next to disappear.

hopefully he will be back soon to let us know how this turned out. I wish I could do something like this but it doesnt really seem possible where I am, especially on the top floor of an apartment building

nine pages and OP vanished... heart breaking. I just got a three gallon carboy and may try this. Starting to linger around 60 during the day with low 50's at night. Two more weeks or so and my carboy may be sitting outside.

Im trying this as we speak. I've had a basic starter (1/4 cup DME, 2 cups water) sitting out amongst my fruit trees for a few days now. There is a basic haze at the bottom of the flask, but nothing yet that looks active.

I'll give it a few more days and report back then!

Cheers

Lucas

you know guys,

on a brewing network podcast, a brewery in belgium stated that their brewery was out in the country...and found that this was much less ideal than being in the city where wild yeast/bacteria were much more concentrated/better for making sour beers.

so maybe there is no need to worry about finding an orchard? just my $0.02

I brought in my flask for a night of warmer air to see if there was any fermentation, but nada, nothing, so out it went back into the backyard.

I'll give it another few days and see what we get.

Cheers


Lucas

I have a great peach tree growing in my yard. Since they're mine, I know for a fact that they haven't been exposed to any poison. I'm highly considering making a wort of some sort and throwing the peaches in there and see what kind of fermentation happens. Spontaneously fermented hefe maybe?

I just picked a couple of the last few apples (golden delicious) from my moms backyard apple tree (trying not to touch them much) and put them in a new unsealed ziplock bag on top of the kitchen fridge for a couple of days.

In the meantime I made a wort with water, table sugar, honey, a bit of juice from a can of cherries and some quick barley and breadcrumbs (1 cup wort total) from the kitchen all boiled together then cooled. Then I made an inoculation loop. Sterilized/sanitized everything and put 2 tsp. into a 50ml bottle (one of those tiny liquor bottles) and inoculated that twice from each apple, flame sterilizing the loop before every inoculation. I shook the bottle several times a day and left the cap loose and stored it on the fridge which is between 72F and 78F. I put in some fresh ginger and beano the next day (I had to get some from the store).

After 3 days I had a slight haze of white on the bottom of the bottle but no "activity" Not knowing that that was exactly the activity I should be seeing I used a flame sterilized xacto knife to scrape some of the waxy coating off each apple (without taking any skin but a little skin wouldn't hurt) and added this to the bottle along with 2 tsp. more wort. this made it take off!! The next morning it had a few bubbles trapped under the surface and was settled out with even more yeast on the bottom.
I now think the xacto knife method is preferred to the inoculation loop method (both work but the loop method is slower due to fewer yeast cells at the start).

After 24hrs I added 4 tsp. more wort.

It has now been 24 hrs and it has tiny bubbles rising and trapped at the surface, smells like yeast and the yeast is staying in suspension and will pressurize if left sealed for a while or if it's shaken.

When it settles out I will pitch the bottle into the rest of the wort in a mason jar then after that settles pitch into 1/2 gal or gallon of that apple juice product that is labeled "Cider" but which is really unfiltered apple juice until it is fermented.
If I can find some without preservatives.

I will be doing this this weekend! Super excited for this.

I have an old bucket that I have used Brett in and I can't get rid of the bug. I love Brett, but if you are trying to brew an Anchor Porter clone, it doesn't work to well. At two weeks the beer tastes fine, then it become thin and loses some fruit character from the yeast, and then at few months is distinctly barnyard. So I figure this bucket is perfect for the task-similar to the method of adding some of the old lambic batch to the new batch.

I have been getting into making small beer recently from the second runnings of my system. I am brewing an all pils pilsner this weekend, and I will add the second runnings from the pilsner to a partial mash of pils/unmalted wheat. I also have about half a pound of 6 month old plus EKGs that I will throw in during the late hop and dry hop phase to keep this as authentic as possible.

I live in NYC, but my friend has a backyard and a terrace that I will put this bucket in, open, with one layer of cheese cloth or hop bag over the top to keep it chunky debris out. A little worried about what the city has in its air, but I am will to try this. The whole point is to get it as deliciously funky as possible, right? I think New York might have some of the most funky airborne yeast/bacteria ever. so lets see....in a few months.

I hope a pigeon doesn't defecate into my bucket. I think there was a House episode were pigeon poo gave a guy malaria, but I have no idea if this is possible. So if I don't respond in 10 months like the OP, you know what happened. If not I will post back.

Ideas, comments, are very welcome.

So, I have taken this idea and run with it. I am trying out my own spontaneous fermentation experiment in my backyard!

I brewed a ~1/2 gallon batch of a generic low gravity ale, lightly hopped with EKG pellets today. The OG looks to be about 1.025 when corrected for temperature. Wrapping the carboy in an old tee shirt and then with my BIAB bag, I have set it out to sit on the balcony on my workshop's upper level.

I live in farm country, with corn and soybeans (I believe) rotating not 20 meters from where the carboy sits. Nothing is planted yet, of course, but I am hoping something takes root. I am not expecting a Rodenbach level of awesomness from these wild yeasts, but I will be thrilled if it turns out with any amount of good taste to it. With such a small batch made up of leftover ingredients, I am going to consider any result profound.

For those in the city: you can try this too! I've visited Cantillon - they're basically in the middle of Brussels. They pump the wort up into a big flat copper coolship at the top of the building, where they leave the windows open so that it can be inoculated by wild yeast. The stuff is everywhere.

I did an experiment of my own a while back - kept a bit of wort aside after a brew day and left it outside to capture some yeast. It worked; on my next brew day, I made a gallon extra and dumped my wild starter into it. Which reminds me, I need to taste that one again after sitting for ~6 months...it was a total banana-bomb at first, now I'm wondering if it's developed into anything sour.

cjb said:

For those in the city: you can try this too! I've visited Cantillon - they're basically in the middle of Brussels. They pump the wort up into a big flat copper coolship at the top of the building, where they leave the windows open so that it can be inoculated by wild yeast. The stuff is everywhere.

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The bugs are everywhere - in the building. There is not much gained from doing it at Cantillon besides tradition, plus the cooling effects. There used to be tons of cherry trees around the area. The area is too built up now to get anything from the air of use. The rafters are full of the critters and leaving the windows open stir up the bugs already in the building. Not to mention the barrels they ferment in. When they put on the new roof they kept all the rafters intact to put back in place to keep the bugs in where they belong. If they started fresh in a new building, even a mile away, they wouldn't get close to what they have now. So you can try this in the city, but I would think you wouldn't get what you were after.

Fair point - most of Cantillon's bugs probably reside in the barrels at this point. I also recall the story about the roof from the tour I took there.

But if anyone wants to capture their own yeast, it doesn't hurt to try! I was able to do it in my own backyard in a normal residential neighborhood in the city (albeit one with a few fruit trees on the block). I recently had another taste of the test beer I made with it - not sour at all, but it does taste somewhat "Belgian". Fairly similar to the Ardennes strain I recently used on another beer, in fact.

If anyone is going to try something like this I think it's extremely important to sanitize the living Christ out of your fermenter. I tried something like this in a growler with some extra wort left over from the boil. This was after lightly sanitizing it with Star-San. At first I thought I was on to something, but then realized that the yeast from a starter I had previously made in it had taken over and fermented it. If there is any trace of Saccharomyces already in your fermenter it will have a head start over any wild bugs, and likely be the dominant attenuator.

TravisRichard said:

If anyone is going to try something like this I think it's extremely important to sanitize the living Christ out of your fermenter. I tried something like this in a growler with some extra wort left over from the boil. This was after lightly sanitizing it with Star-San. At first I thought I was on to something, but then realized that the yeast from a starter I had previously made in it had taken over and fermented it. If there is any trace of Saccharomyces already in your fermenter it will have a head start over any wild bugs, and likely be the dominant attenuator.

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It doesn't sound like your issue was lack of sanitation. Sounds like lack of cleaning.

And CJB, I wasn't trying to say people shouldn't try and catch their own, I encourage that. I was just exempting Cantillon as they don't capture much "wild" yeast any longer.

suprchunk said:

It doesn't sound like your issue was lack of sanitation. Sounds like lack of cleaning.

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Thanks for the condescension without any explanation. Very helpful. I cleaned it with soap and water, and there was no visible sediment left in the growler, btw.

Subscribed.

Awesome idea! I'm going to be doing this too.

2.5 gallons of a 7.5 gallon batch went into a bucket covered with two paint filters left in my garage and it had action within two days. Very cool stuff! I brought it in from the garage so it will ferment at about 70. I took the paint filters off and installed an airlock. Hopefully that was the right thing to do. I'd hate to wreck my spontaneously fermented wort.

The other 5 gallons were pitched with WLP670.

We were kind of just screwin' around with airborne yeast strains in our brewery. We took two different starters with DME in them and put one outside, near the sea in California and by a freeway, and one inside the brewery. We specialize in wild barrel-aged beers that usually turn out nicely tart. Rather then ruining a huge batch of beer, we checked on small starters to see what was happening. We don't separate or dedicate all of our equipment, except for fermentors to our brett beers, so we always have some of our bugs in all of our beers. Our IPAs, porters, and non-bretted saisons just to name a few sale so fast there really is no reason to separate equipment.

Anyway the two yeast starters were pretty sour, comparable to wild yeast strains we had built up from dregs and commercial wild yeast strains. The one outside was nice even though we are near a freeway. I say, just try it, if you don't want to ruin a batch just make a starter and if it tastes good then your beer will probably taste good too.

Is OP still missing in action? What happened with this beer?