is temp related directly to how often to feed? Refrigerate or not

"It just seems like if it takes 3 days to get a refrigerated starter up and ready for baking,…"

This is an extreme case and I'm worried already about a starter that takes 3 days to be ready.

We don't know how the starter is maintained but my refrigerated starter works well.  It takes just an overnight inoculation at warmer temps at or above 73°F and the elaborated starter is ready.  The refrigerator provides a constant thru the year.  

With seasonal changes, a starter sitting at fluctuating room temps requires more vigilant care and watching.  It can be done and you may find yourself converting to a wet or high hydration starter.  I say try what you have in mind and see what happens.  Your premiss is good and it should work in my opinion.  Be careful not to over feed.  Better to underfeed at 60°F.  Don't be surprised that a feeding  may stretch out to once every few days.  If you starter is new, better to get into this pattern asap to let the starter adapt once you have awaken the yeast and bacteria. You want a fair amount of organisms before you start experimenting.  Try dividing the culture, one for the fridge and one out.   Once you drop the temps, let the starter tell you when it needs more food.  Cover to prevent drying out.  Just like a refrigerated starter, you want to see some fermentation before dropping to room temp so that there is enough acid in the starter for self defence.  

With all the watching and feeding there is a danger that one becomes a slave to the starter.  Make the starter fit your schedule not the other way around.  

Your starter is a living thing. It requires a livable environment (pH,temp,air, cleanliness), and food to live well. It is like a cage of rabbits and hamsters (yeast and lactobacillus).

When you first start, you have just a few wee beasties-prob. more lactos than yeasts. If you keep the temp cooler, the lactos will produce faster than the yeast. The yeast will be sluggish and want to hibernate in a cool environment.

Bad bacteria can move in at this point because the lactos have not had enough time to make the culture acidic,yet. This is why some instructions for making a starter will have you use pineapple or orange juice. It discourages nasty bacteria. Different bad bacteria can move in later if the culture is acidic but weak and warm. They are generally stinky-like old feet. Persistent and hard to recover from an infection with them. So if you want to keep a room temp culture, plan on feeding more often and good cleanliness.

Back to maintenance. When you first stir flour and water, the natural lacto and yeast culture that was on the wheat seed when it was ground into flour is activated but with a low population. There is plenty of food but you have to stir a few times a day so they are exposed to more food-they don't move too well at this stage. Lactos grow and produce acid. Yeast likes the acid environment and will start reproducing more rapidly. (I think they are more like bunnies than hamsters but both are prolific). If you keep it cool(70-80), the lactos will reproduce rapidly while the yeast remain a bit sluggish. If you keep it about 80-84F, the yeast population will explode.

Either way, all the wee beasties now need more food and to have their cage cleaned. So discard half (or remove some for a bake) and add more food and water. At this point the hydration is unimportant but realize that the more liquid, the faster they can access food. It is easier to move through a liquid than paste environment. By the way, any hootch formation while at room temp (above 40F) means they are starving and going to an alternate metabolism. They won't last long. Feed immediately. Some hootch formation on a refrigerated culture is ok-like having a rumbly tummy at night. Their metabolism is pretty slow.

I refrigerate my culture in between bakes. If I bake every week, I remove a few tablespoons and either build the starter that day for a recipe or make a preferment for the next day's bake. The only time I do a 3 day build is when I'm going to make something like pannettone, specialty recipe or large multiple bakes-like the 24 French breads one year as holiday gifts. Whew! These times called for a very active culture to minimize fermentation and proofing time. Ideally, if you bake every day or every other day, your culture will be active enough. If you bake less often then you have to wake it up a bit. Or add a teaspoon of commercial yeast to give it a boost. I've done that ,also, in the name of getting sleep.

So re-read this a few times and think about what sourdough actually IS. And bake some delicioius fun!

make, how often you bake bread and how much waste you can afford.  If you like white bread that isn't very sour bake every other day then you want to keep just enough on the counter to make the next batch of bread and have enough left over to feed after taking out for that bake.

If you bake one a week you can do the same thing but after feeding and sitting on the counter for a while you can put in the fridge till the next bake.

I bake one a week but am totally lazy and like sour bread so I keep 120 g of stiff rye starter in the fridge and use 5 -10g every week to bake with and then put the rest back in the fridge.  This way I have no starter maintenance or feeding for up to half a year and every week all I have to do is build a levain and 12 hours after starting it I am ready to bake.

If you are well off, like to waste flour and your time feeding starter on the counter..... while throwing away most of the starter because you don't bake enough - I say I am glad I am not you - but I used to do that - for years!  Here is a post on what I do now

No Muss No Fuss Starter

There are 1000's of ways to maintain starters and 1000's more ways to "build" them for production - you need to find a way that suits your own times and techniques. Be in control of it and don't let it rule you...

At the simple, almost naive level you can just think of it as a living soup. You have a yeast and some bacteria and a supply of food to keep it going. Make them nice and warm (which might be low to mid 30's °C) and they'll work - enzymes will convert starches into sugars, the yeasts will convert the sugars into gas and alcohol, the bacteria convert it into lactic + acetic acids. Cool them down and they'll slow down to the point of near hibernation at about 4°C. The bacteria work a little faster than the yeasts so you tend to get more acid than bubbles proportionally. (This also varys by temperature but at the extreme ends it makes more acids)

So you can use the hibernation state to keep them preserved. This is how fridges work - cool your meat/veg. down to 4°C and the spoilage organisms slow down - they don't stop completely, but are very much slower.

So if you're using the fridge as hibernation for your weekly bread (Which is exactly how I started) then you need to make sure that you have a good active and viable culture before you put it in the fridge. I did experiment with many different methods in my early days of sourdough and came up with 2 that suit me. The first is to use it directly from the fridge. Take it out, give it a stir, add what I need into the mix. Then top-up the jar, leave it out for a few hours until it starts to bubble then back into the fridge for another week. The other way is to take some out of the jar into a bigger bowl, add flour + water to this, mix and leave covered, and at the same time top-up the jar and leave this out too. When the bowl is ready - 3-5 hours later, the jar is too, so the jar goes into the fridge and I use what's in the bowl. I do it this way 5 days a week now, using my 550g of fridged starter to make up to 2500g of "production levian" for that nights mix & knead.

I still use some from the fridge directly - last night I used 240g of spelt starter from the fridge to make up dough for 4 spelt loaves - this was at about 8pm - I topped up the jar, it it stood on the counter for about 1.5 hours then went back in the fridge. (I'll use it again on Monday night and do the same thing)

People that take 3 days to build a "production levian" are probably trying to achieve other things - making sure its fresh and lively by throwing some away then adding more - maybe that reduces the acid, maybe that increases the yeasts, maybe it imparts a flavour they're after... Or maybe they just don't have a very active starter in the fridge to start with - I don't know as I've never tried these methods. I've read of people who don't use the fridge and feed their starter daily - every 12 hours - even one who feeds his every 5 hours and creates a new one from scratch every 4-5 weeks (He obviously doesn't get regular sleep) Seems a waste to me, but his bread is reportedly amazing. (Gerard Rubaud. Look him up!)

I know this hasn't given you an answer, but maybe some insight!

-Gordon

when the starter stays mild after some time fermenting, and tastes either sour or like wet flour (spit out after tasting) and it doesn't rise much even when thickened or dough like.  It will not smell yeasty.  It will have a pH reading above 5.  It also has a tendency to mould and smell more musty than fruity or nutty.  If the starter is a wet one... over 100% hydration, water and flour tend to separate;  clear water means little or no activity (overfeeding) whereas cloudy water would indicate the starter is actively stirring itself -- a good sign.  

How to deal with overfeeding?  Skip or stop feeding, just stir until the profile changes dramatically.  It could take days to change.  Discard to reduce the starter to half a cup but do not feed more flour.   Small addition of warm (bath temp) water may help speed up or encourage fermentation.  Look for a warmer standing spot above 75°F.    

Does that help?