I haven't seen much mention of brewing with sourdough here, so I thought I'd post my experiences.
This is not about making sourdough bread from beer yeast, but about brewing beer using sourdough yeast.
About 4 years ago, as part of my bread-making obsession, I captured a wild yeast in my kitchen from a rye flour slurry. Over the years, I've been nurturing and baking with it, and getting a pretty good understanding of how it reacts to time and temperature - we've become a good team. The yeast is quite hardy, but has never been an overly 'sour' sourdough. Every time I go to refresh the starter, I smell to make sure it hasn't spoiled. Every time, there's a light fruity-floral scent.
I've long thought about attempting to make beer, but always put it off as yet another obsession I didn't need. That is, until last November. With lots of research and reading (much of it here), I cobbled together a BIAB system for small 1-2 gallon batches.
My first 'brew' was simply a small all-grain starter, pressured canned into small mason jars, with no hops - just to see if my yeast would take to it. A dollop into a jar showed signs of bubbling after a few hours. A week later, and it had fermented. It smelled beer-ish, and tasted beer-ish, with a distinct sour-ness.
Time to try a real batch. Using a lightly hopped starter, I stepped up the yeast over a period of 5 days, brewed a 1-gallon batch of California Common, and threw caution to the wind and pitched the sourdough.
After 10 days fermenting, I cool-crashed for 4 days. Bottled and waited 4 weeks. Man, that wait was hard.
Just after Christmas, I had a buddy come over and we tried it. It was delicious. There was no lacto sour, as I assume the acidity of the hops overpowered the lacto in the starter. There were slight hints of fruit/flora, but not overpowering. It was a nicely balanced, flavorful beer.
Great - another obsession.
I've repitched that yeast at least 4 times now, mostly with success. I'm still working out other aspects of my system, and have been scaling up to bigger batches. I even did a no-boil Berliner Weisse which allowed the lacto to come through.
I'm interested in continuing to pitch and nurture this culture - my own house yeast, and I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has experience propagating their yeast over a long term. Since the starter has been born and developed in my home, I would think there would be less of an issue of infection, since technically it kinda already is an infection.
Thanks,
Dave
This is not about making sourdough bread from beer yeast, but about brewing beer using sourdough yeast.
About 4 years ago, as part of my bread-making obsession, I captured a wild yeast in my kitchen from a rye flour slurry. Over the years, I've been nurturing and baking with it, and getting a pretty good understanding of how it reacts to time and temperature - we've become a good team. The yeast is quite hardy, but has never been an overly 'sour' sourdough. Every time I go to refresh the starter, I smell to make sure it hasn't spoiled. Every time, there's a light fruity-floral scent.
I've long thought about attempting to make beer, but always put it off as yet another obsession I didn't need. That is, until last November. With lots of research and reading (much of it here), I cobbled together a BIAB system for small 1-2 gallon batches.
My first 'brew' was simply a small all-grain starter, pressured canned into small mason jars, with no hops - just to see if my yeast would take to it. A dollop into a jar showed signs of bubbling after a few hours. A week later, and it had fermented. It smelled beer-ish, and tasted beer-ish, with a distinct sour-ness.
Time to try a real batch. Using a lightly hopped starter, I stepped up the yeast over a period of 5 days, brewed a 1-gallon batch of California Common, and threw caution to the wind and pitched the sourdough.
After 10 days fermenting, I cool-crashed for 4 days. Bottled and waited 4 weeks. Man, that wait was hard.
Just after Christmas, I had a buddy come over and we tried it. It was delicious. There was no lacto sour, as I assume the acidity of the hops overpowered the lacto in the starter. There were slight hints of fruit/flora, but not overpowering. It was a nicely balanced, flavorful beer.
Great - another obsession.
I've repitched that yeast at least 4 times now, mostly with success. I'm still working out other aspects of my system, and have been scaling up to bigger batches. I even did a no-boil Berliner Weisse which allowed the lacto to come through.
I'm interested in continuing to pitch and nurture this culture - my own house yeast, and I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has experience propagating their yeast over a long term. Since the starter has been born and developed in my home, I would think there would be less of an issue of infection, since technically it kinda already is an infection.
Thanks,
Dave
