Jocky wrote:What was with the idea of throwing in about 5 different types of yeast? Just to ferment it and see what happens, and then potentially harvest the yeast if it's good?
Yeah, basically. I normally just dump my spent grains on the compost pile, so it cost nothing to try something fun. Plus, if it works, I've built up and reinvigorated my sour blend. By "5 yeasts", I assume you're referring to:
seymour wrote:Finally--and this is the really crazy part--I pitched dregs from a mate's delicious wild fermented beer, plus dregs from my seriously sour Imperial Berliner Weiss, plus a wild yeast I cultured from Bulgarian juniper berries, plus a small Duvel bottle culture. It's a whole zoo of microorganisms, but I'm very excited to taste this experiment in a month or so.
Technically, I'm sure there are many more than five yeast strains, plus Lactobacillus bulgaricus, Lactobacillus acidophilus, Lactobacillus bifidus, and many others which aren't exactly yeast at all.
Okay, only because you asked, my thinking was basically along these lines:
Duvel yeast for the heavy lifting, because it's a Belgian powerhouse, and I wanted mine to have
some regular beer flavours.
Dregs from my Berliner Weiss because it was insanely delicious, can't go wrong pitching it again.
Dregs from my mate's wild fermented beer because I loved it and wanted to recreate something along those lines. His was browner and maltier than any other sour I'd tasted, so I wanted to ensure I had something capable of that in my own blend (incidentally I gave him back a six pack of my own Chocolate Sour plus a jar of the newly blended dregs. He's planning to use it on a Saison with NZ Rakau hops. Mmmmm.)
Dregs I cultured from Bulgarian juniper berries because (as I've said) that part of the world is the possible earliest origin of most familiar fermenting strains used for yogurt, kvass, cheese, pickled vegetables, etc, and for the same reasons, the native people groups who consume them are among the healthiest and longest-lived in the world (this is obviously an area of interest for me as a brewer and as a human, even modern doctors understand that death usually starts in the colon, assist your body's ability to digest stuff, you'll unburden your immune system and stave off the starting points of much disease and decay, I could go on and on...) Plus, I tasted it to be sure, it didn't suck, so I couldn't resist.
This time everything came together and worked, against all odds, so it lives to fight another day... I'll just keep compounding this bad boy until it sucks.
Short answer: Single-strain fermentation is boring and overrated.
