Sourdough "Hooch"

I have been making my own sour dough bread from base malt wheat that I get from my local brew store. I make my starter with only malt that I mill with my Vitamix blender "dry container" and water. I wild ferment the starter by mixing table spoon for table spoon malt flour and water and let sit out side in some switch grass under some pine trees with a quadruple layer of cheese cloth rubber banded over the mouth of the jar(all the layers are to keep out tiny critters). I bring the culture in at night and put out in the evening once I get home from work around 5. I mix in fresh flour and water when I put it out and when I bring it back in and give it a really good stirring with a bamboo skewer(used to make grilled kebabs). I replace the cheese cloth with a lid when I bring the culture back inside. Once the culture is actively fermenting I use it for bread AND I also use the same culture for beer. I take the finished sourdough culture and place it in the fridge until all of the flour has settled out and the liquid layer has risen to the top. I mash out wheat malt and when it has cooled I pitch the liquid layer or "HOOCH" off the top of my culture into my wort and its takes off fermenting. Has anyone used this method for making a wild fermented beer?

 

Good write up and welcome to HBT!

I have wanted to do something similar for sourdough bread.

Besides wild yeast, some have made beer with the naturally existinf lactobasilus (sp) which lives on grain-- check out berliner weiss beers. A guy has a how to lacto starter on the Imperial BW recipe thread here.
cheers!

 

with 4 layers of cheese cloth would taking your starter outside really do anything? You're pretty much inoculating the starter with lacto and bacteria from the flour.

I just mix 2 parts filtered water to 1 part whole wheat flour and 1 part bread flour. Cover with a kitchen towel and sit for a day. Each day I discard 3/4 of the starter and add a handfull of my 50:50 flour mixture and water. It gets nice and funky sour.

 

I make sourdough from a starter i've had going for years. the hooch on the top is an alcohol based by product of fermentation, not the yeast itself.

 

The beer is not sour. I have made 5 gallons this way so far. I brew a gallon at a time and bottle with 3/16 of a cup of honey for in bottle fermentation. I really dont think that you are right about the culture just being bacteria two hearted. One sheet layer of cheese cloth is really quite thin and that is why I use multiple layers. The bacteria that lives in a sourdough culture partially uses maltose as a food source for the bacteria. One of the glucose molecules is unused from the maltose and gets consumed by yeast in the culture.