Ive read some articles and threads here on how to brew with wild yeast. Its not something I would till I have years of experience with regular brewing. Curious to know if anyone has tried it and what the results were from your experiment.
Long story short, I finally tried it by attempting to capture wild yeast in a variety of manners. What ultimately was the most fruitful was forced inoculation by local flora into a test tube of wort, as well as a full-scale (5gal) batch left overnight to cool (utilizing a variety of factors: pre-acidifying the wort, specific hopping rate, etc.).
Despite it being the most fruitful process, what I captured wasn't attenuative and (to me) didn't have a good flavor profile. The more successful processes I tried yielded the same or similar flavor profile, so I'm surmising that's what my local terroir is, so I don't plan on progressing because I don't like it.
That said, PLENTY of people successfully capture very good wild yeasts via a variety of methods.
Wild yeast are more likely to be poor attenuators...
Not always. In October I tasted my latest attempt, one year after brewing. In one year it went from 1.048 to.... 1.048. It definitely had the terroir flavor, but nothing that could ferment. This was VERY surprising to say the least, considering I did see a very active (what I thought was a) krausen around week 2-3. As soon as I hit it with WY3711 it took off, but I had NO faith in the absence of botulism toxin after the unfermented wort had sat for a full year. (my notes didn't shed any light as to whether or not I pre-acidified, so I didn't want to take the chance and dumped it)Low attenuators of you don't wait long enough. There's almost always something in there that can eat longer sugars, it's just not as quickly growing as the other yeasts. Give it some time and the attenuation will go down by itself. Talking about half a year minimum.
I did that myself.... Result tasted horrible
I think the milkthefunkguys probably did stuff like this... there are also some really freaky guys out there who are isolating single yeast strains from wild captures and evaluating their brewing capabilities. I do not remember who, but somebody here did that for mead brewing with wild yeast from honey.I wonder if anyone has tried to train them to ferment. Like say doing a starter every week for a year with washing occasionally instead of just building it up till you got a good pitch and try it in a beer? Sounds to me like they got to be trained like rocky! It’s got to pound some dead cow carcasses before taking on Apollo Creed.
What is your propagation method?I am brewing my Spruce Amber Ale with yeast a wrangled from a cherry blossom. I held down the funk and absolutely love that yeast. I also did a blonde with yeast I collected near a rhododendron plant.
There are plenty of commercially available wild strains. I don’t really understand just throwing some random dirt/branches into perfectly good wort.
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