Wild Yeast Experiment.

WILD YEAST CULTURE EXPERIMENT

[Ok before I even start I know that there are other threads on here about this and I have read most of them. I just wanted to start anther threat to discuss what I am doing and get some feedback.]

My Motivation:

I am a curious person by nature and after noticing the huge amount of wild grapes growing around where I live, I decided to attempt culturing wild yeast from them. I actually ended up trying to culture wild yeast from two sources, Black Raspberries and wild grapes.

From My Notes:

TUESDAY JULY 12TH:

-I sanitized two 1 liter bottles.

-Boiled 24 ounces of water to create a culturing medium (used amber Briess DME & a little brown sugar with about an ounce of whole hops and some yeast nutrient).

-OG of Wort was right around 1.045 (a little high for a starter)

-Harvested grapes black raspberries and added them to separate bottles with cool (80 degree starter wort).

-Airlocked bottles

THURSDAY JULY 14TH

-We have krausen! Both starters appear to be fermenting.

FRIDAY JULY 15TH

-Brewed 1/2 gallon of wort for step-up (highly hopped with 1oz of cascade pellet hops).

-Added wort to ~1/8 gallon cold water.

-Pitched grape yeast starter into step up wort.

SATURDAY JULY 16TH - Yeast Action! Bubbling Krausen

From the airlock it smells strong like wine and sourish?

TUESDAY JULY 19TH

Thought about tossing the black raspberry starter because there was a little moldy island floating on top but decided to make a step-up and pitch it anyway to see what happens.

-Measured the SG of black raspberry starter and it had fallen to 1.020. (The color of the black raspberry starter was purplish red from the berries).

-Made some highly hopped (1 oz Centenial pellets w/ 30 min boil in 1/2 gallon of wort) wort with light malt extract & brown sugar (why not experiment a little more?).

-Pitched black raspberry starter hot (~98 degrees) and gave it a good aeration shake before airlocking it.

THURSDAY, JULY 21ST

The black raspberry step-up is fermenting vigorously!

From the airlock it smells a little vinous and maybe sourish?

The grape starter yeast seems to have slowed down, but I gave it a swirl and it picked up a little.

What are everyone's thoughts on this so far? Do I potentially have something to work with here?

Discussion:

Sounds perfect.

COLObrewer,

I actually read your wild yeast thread about your juniper berry trials. Good stuff, and helpful!

This is the easy part, people have been harvesting yeast in this manner for millenia. The hard part is figuring out what it's good for. What style, what temperature, what's the flocculation, what's the alcohol range, what off flavors does it throw at these different parameters, what the attenuation is, etc, etc.

It is, however a fun journey for some of us, yeast on my friend

Do a one gallon pilot batch w wort from some of your future brews to see how it tastes w different malts, as well as determine the time it takes to finish, some wild ones will take months.

If you know a microbiologist he can streak it out and isolate the numerous different strains you have, then use each unique one and blend together for the superfunk

Did you pitch warm intentionally? I understand the high hopping rates to inhibit bacteria. Wild yeast ranching is all new territory for me.