mother funker

I have been thinking about brewing some sours for a long time, one thing that I would like to try is to keep some "house" funk. I'm just wondering how I would go about this, would it work if I just pull some dregs from previous batches and keep a blend of the bugs alive in a gallon of fresh wort?

side note - I'm just starting to read wild brews, it seems like a really good book.

after a little more research I found that if you keep using a blend for too long it will become unbalanced

now I'm thinking about a straight Brettanomyces Lambicus "house" culture.

Listen to the Jamil Show on Lambics (or is it the Flanders show?). Anyways, I think he talks about culturing from a kitchen sponge!

eschatz said:

Listen to the Jamil Show on Lambics (or is it the Flanders show?). Anyways, I think he talks about culturing from a kitchen sponge!

Click to expand...

Not to actually use. They were talking about culturing saliva and seeing if anything grows, and Jamil said that he tried that and nothing grew, but he cultured from a kitchen sponge and he said the nastiest things pop up. His only point (and it was definitely a side point) was that the kitchen is a disgusting place, and the sponge is definitely disgusting.

You can get some bits of wood and put them in the fermentors. They will become infected with the bugs similar to a barrel. Over time the mix of bugs present in the wood will become stable enough to allow you to rely only on the wood to innoculate the wort.

how would I know the "pitch" rate of the bugs using oak? how would you store the oak if you didn't have a fresh beer to pitch the chips into?

The pitch rate is not important with bugs, they work slowly and breeding stress makes up some of their character.

easy solution to storage is just always have a batch of beer for them.
You could also just keep it in a jar of starter wort, depending on the size of the wood.

If breeding stress makes up some of their character (and I have certainly read this is true with Brett) doesn't that make pitch rate extremely important?

I suppose yes, but my point is if you want to develop "house funk" you dont need to worry about pitching 200,000,000 viable cells versus pitching 40,000,000. Part of the whole "house funk" thing is that you dont know what it will be like until it happens.
To the OP: Were you going to pitch pure cultures of the organisms or were you going to spontaniously ferment?

Brettanomyces Lambicus pure culture then pitching into consecutive batches, I'm thinking that it would mutate over time and probably pick up some wild yeast form the environment eventually. I have no idea how well this will work its just an idea, maybe I will try going with some oak and some slurry. I just started reading wild brews so this plan might change soon.

I've been thinking about this too, what if you were to get an oak dowel, say 1", then cut some slots on the side on one end of it, then stir it around in the trub, and store it in the cellar, would the yeast be viable in a week? A month? etc. I've read that the picts beer was inoculated by their stirring spoon before they ever learned about yeast, but, was this spoon ever stored "dry" for any length of time? Numerous questions arise.

Wild brews is a great book, well written and chock full of info. Lots of fun, Im about to reread it.

I'm just starting to read the flanders section, I just got my Wyeast Roeselare Blend and wlp belgian sour mix is on order.