Hair of the Dog Bread
Has anyone else tried reculturing the sediment at the bottom of a bottle of beer and using it in bread? Note that this won't work with industrial swill. It has to be a microbrewed beer with live yeast in it (bottle conditioned). If it has yeasty-tasting sediment at the bottom of the bottle, that's a good clue that it will work. I tried it with a bottle of one of my favorites, Doggie Claws from the Portland micro Hair of the Dog Brewing. This bottle is a 2002 vintage, so that yeast had been sleeping (and drinking fine beer) in there for five years before I disturbed it. I drank the beer first of course. Then mixed the sediment with water and flour, like recharging a sourdough starter. It roused a bit but didn't get real bubbly. I refreshed it again. And I mixed it into my dough along with the usual amount of sourdough starter (see my modified sourdough version of NYT-style no-knead bread elsewhere on this site). So I didn't trust the beer yeast to leaven the bread. But lemme tell ya, that dough rose so nicely, and the bread rose some more in the oven (cold start in cast iron, again see my other post for details). And browned and cracked so perfectly. It is just one of the most beautiful breads I've ever seen. Someone please explain to me how to post a digital pic on this site and I'll show it to you. Now, we all know that weather, flour (I used 2/3 Gold Medal Best for Bread unbleached, 1/6 whole wheat, the other 1/6 rye with a little barley flour to make the beer yeast happy), other factors, some mysterious, make one loaf better than another. But still y'all might want to experiment with beer-bottle-cultured yeast and let me know how it turns out. Cheers! bluesbread
Hrm I don't know about sourdough, but could you just find out what kind of yeast the brewer uses and use that instead of scraping the leavings?
No. Brewers use very specific yeast cultures, their yeast is a precious and closely guarded resource. They employ chemists to examine their yeasts regularly and make sure they haven't mutated (as our sourdough cultures do when they start tasting different -- we usually don't mind that but the brewery's regular customers might not appreciate it if their beer tastes different this month).
that SDBaker was mentioning from his lessons from San Fran Baking Institute. Could this be? Mini Oven
Amber -- Thanks for the suggestions. And I would love you to try reculturing beer yeast for use in bread, and reporting back on your results. But I think when trying to reculture the beer yeast for bread, it'd be better to use flour and water, not malt and water. We're trying to wean this batch of yeasties off the barley and onto the wheat, right? At least that's the premise I'm following. But again, please try it your way and let us know how it works. Cheers, bluesbread
I realize this is an old thread, but I made a great culture from the dregs from a bottle of Freemont Brewing of Ballard WA that is quite active, yields a very tasty loaf. I plan on using it for a batch with high extraction flour and Calapooia Porter. Will post on new when finished.