Adding Commercial beer to a starter?

A friend mentioned something about throwing some store bought beer that you like into your starter, and that it would "lend some of the character of that beer into your batch".

Any truth to this?

Why bother putting it in the starter, if that's what you wanted to do? The commercial beer's fully fermented, so it's not going to help the yeast get started. I can't imagine a single bottle of beer in a whole batch would be noticable in the least; hell, just find a clone recipe, if that's what you want! Otherwise, you'll just be making a beer that's 2% a commercial example and 98% what you brewed.

Are you sure he wasn't talking about havesting the yeast from a bottle of commercial to make a starter?

olllllo said:

Are you sure he wasn't talking about havesting the yeast from a bottle of commercial to make a starter?

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This makes much more sense. I've done this with Hoegaarden and was very pleased with the results. I see no benefit of adding commercial beer to homebrew at any point during the brewing process.

I think yer friend was talking about the yeast from a commercial brew, that hasn't been filtered to remove the yeast.

but you'd do this to instead of adding any other yeast to the starter.

If you did try to harvest yeast from a commercial bottle, how would you go about it?

Danek said:

If you did try to harvest yeast from a commercial bottle, how would you go about it?

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You'd need an unfiltered beer. Usually the last bit in the bottle will have the slurry, so swirl is and pour it into a small amount of starter. A couple hours later (or the next morning) double the size of the starter. Within a few hours you'll be good to go.

You only have to watch out for beers that are conditioned with a different type of yeast from what they were fermented with. I have heard a few out there are done this way and would not help you to produce the same clone beer or flavor you are looking for. I have read about a lot of home brewers that produce lagers that do this for bottle conditioning/carbonating using ale yeast because they filtered or other reasons. Could you imagine how pissed you would be to find out you waited all that time for a smooth lager only to have an ale, lol.