Ancient brewing ingredients

[zoomzilla]

I've been looking for recipes for how ancient people brewed beer and all i can find are the same two or three articles and none of them are any real help. Mainly, I'm wondering how to brew beer when you don't have any yeast available. I know you can make a bread starter just by putting flour and water in a bowl and letting it sit. Eventually it will get enough yeast to start bubbling. Since this contains yeast couldn't you just pitch the liquidy dough starter into the carboy like you would any commercial strain of yeast. Obviously it wouldn't be brewer's quality yeast, but I think it should work. Any suggestions?

 

[USMCYoder]

I feel that even if you pitched that "yeast" into your wort and it started fermenting, that alcohol would soon kill the "yeast" after fermentation started. From what I have read and heard, brewer's yeast is made to withstand the alcohol, in which other yeasts don't have as high of a "tolerance".

But I could be totally wrong and misunderstood what I read.

 

[lumpher]

google "ancient brew recipes". you'll find a ton. anything you leave sitting out that has sugar in it will eventually ferment due to wild yeast. you can leave a piece of fruit out till it starts rotting, and throw it in, and that'll ferment. just depends on what you want to make. many people make the wort, and leave it uncovered for a few days till it starts getting krausen, then cap it. i've seen a gold medal won in the bluebonnet won that way (2 years after brewing)

 

[rockfish42]

You can in fact use sourdough starter to ferment beer, eventually you'll have some sourness from the lactobacillus present though.

 

[Captain Damage]

Beer was made for around 10,000 years before anyone even knew what yeast was. Brewing yeasts were cultivated somewhat by accident as the barrels or vessels that made good beer were kept and the ones that made bad beer were destroyed. Innoculating beer with sourdough starter is an old method, but the outcome will be dependent on the makeup of your particular starter. But it's really not much different from the traditional-but-still-current Belgian practice of innoculating your wort with the wind.

 

[zoomzilla]

ok, good to know. I heard you can use the trub from previous brews but I thought that after re using it a few times it wouldn't work any more.

 

[Captain Damage]

In principle you can reuse your yeast indefinitely. But the yeast will change over time, and it may change in ways you don't like. The yeast's "goal," such asi it is, is to stay alive and reproduce. Your (our) goal is to make good beer, and we need yeast to do that. These two goals are no always compatible. Yeast is alive and is subject to selection pressure. Unless you are in a position to influence those selection pressures, by selecting yeasts that you like and destroying those you don't, you are likely to eventually wind up with a house strain that is good at living and reproducing in wort, but not necessarily good at making beer.

 

[indigi]

Ancients having stuck fermentation problems would pick a couple grapes and just toss them into the fermeting vessel. Make sure you get them from an orchard or a food co-op/local grocer that sells local ingredients, supermarkets wash most of the yeast off their grapes.


One main method to ensure fermentation was to always use the same stick to stir the wort/must/whatever, because it would harbor the yeast in the pores and innoculate each new batch. Sort of like how Belgian breweries just dump their wort into house barrels that contain all the yeasts/bacteria.