Use of cultures from yogurt / kefir / probiotic tablets?

[MattTimBell]

Hey all,

I'm curious: has anyone added yogurt, kefir, or ground up probiotic tablets to a batch and gotten good results? I ran across another thread here from two years ago indicating somebody used the live bugs from a Mexican yogurt-based drink to sour his wort for a few days before pitching yeast, with some success reported, and I'm wondering whether similar results could be obtained from these other sources.

More particular questions: will the milk protiens in yogurt or kefir settle out into trub, or keep floating (or worse, mix in)? Will the organisms in these products compete too aggresively with Sacc or Brett added for the primary fermentation?

The kefir at the local Trader Joes says it has a whole mess of organisms, some of which Google says have been detected in lambics. The whole list includes L. casei, L. lactis, L. acidophilus, L. plantarum, L. rhamnosus, B. bacterium longum, Leuconostoc cremoris, B. bacterium breve, S. diacetylactis, Saccharomyces florentinus. Do any of these names ring a bell as something very undesirable, even in a sour beer?

Thanks!

-- Matt

 

[FromZwolle]

i have a kefir-soured raspberry beer bottled up right now. i used some milk grains converted to malt though, not the liquid stuff. it's a pretty unique taste. crisp and refreshing, with bold sour/funk character that you can find from the kefir. i need to brew some more base beer to finish my experiment, but i'm a little short on time. I'll be sure to post the results with some pics when everything's finished.

If you wanted to try it out, i would try to source some kefir milk grains online, then put them in a starter to switch them from milk to malt.