Brewing a Spontaneous Beer

[SwampFoxBrewer]

I’ve been fascinated recently by the concept of brewing a spontaneous (wild?) beer that is inoculated with wild yeast. I’d like to try and get a batch started before the air gets warmer and gunked up.

Does anyone have any resources you’d recommend for further research? Possibly even a base wort recipe?

 

[grampamark]

Somehow, combining “spontaneous”, “research”, and “recipe” in your post doesn’t compute.

Get a couple pounds of unmalted grain, place it in a shallow vessel in a little water, and leave it in a warm place. When it sprouts, place it in an open container with a gallon or so of water and leave it where it’s warm. If there’s wild yeast present (and there almost certainly will be; it’s everywhere) you’ll see signs of fermentation in a day or two. When the krausen drops let it settle for a few days. Then taste it. It will probably taste like a first runnings sample (think-Cap’n Crunch) with whatever the yeast brought to the party.

Really spontaneous would be to toss the grain in a puddle and let nature take it’s course. That’s probably how fermented beverages were discovered, thousands of years ago.

 

[hotbeer]

Every few years I get the desire to make sour dough bread. I'll take un-malted grain and put it in a 50/50 water/flour mixture and it doesn't take long for the yeast to make themselves known.

It does take quite a few weeks of culturing the yeast to get it strong and enough of them to raise a loaf of bread properly. The crumb and texture of the bread is fantastic. But still my sour dough bread isn't anything like the taste of sour dough that I want it to be.

Beer is easier to deal with. Especially when using known strains of yeast to produce the desired result. Hoping that you'll culturing enough of the yeasts that will produce decent flavored beer is more of a risk.

 

[SwampFoxBrewer]

Somehow, combining “spontaneous”, “research”, and “recipe” in your post doesn’t compute.

Get a couple pounds of unmalted grain, place it in a shallow vessel in a little water, and leave it in a warm place. When it sprouts, place it in an open container with a gallon or so of water and leave it where it’s warm. If there’s wild yeast present (and there almost certainly will be; it’s everywhere) you’ll see signs of fermentation in a day or two. When the krausen drops let it settle for a few days. Then taste it. It will probably taste like a first runnings sample (think-Cap’n Crunch) with whatever the yeast brought to the party.

Really spontaneous would be to toss the grain in a puddle and let nature take it’s course. That’s probably how fermented beverages were discovered, thousands of years ago.

I think this is more of what I was looking for. When I referred to “recipe”, I guess I meant something closer to “guidelines” Kind of hard to call something “spontaneous” if it’s held to strict parameters…

The questions I was aiming to answer are more along the lines of what kinds of malts to use, how much, are hops involved, what kind of environment should I use to introduce yeast to the wort, etc.

In essence, for those who have brewed spontaneous beers before, what did you do.

 

[IslandLizard]

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