From sour beer to sourdough?
I'm brand new to sourdough starters so please excuse a potentially ignorant question. I'm trying to avoid wasting time and resources on well explored blind alleys . The TFL search function only turned up a few semi-germane threads.
The gist of my question is as follows: is it worthwhile to try to create a sourdough starter using a sour beer inoculant? For the benefit of non beer geeks here, the vast majority of beers strive to use a monoculture of a specific strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae but a few beers use an anachronistic method/device (a coolship, a very large, shallow tank) to invite in/capture diverse wild yeasts and bacteria including Saccharomyces sp., Lactobacillus, Pediococcus, Acetobacter and Brettanomyces. Depending on the specific style of "sour" beer these may use unmalted wheat in addition to malted barley to produce their wort. The modern antecedents of these beer styles are from the Pajottenland and Zenne valley regions of Belgium but the roots are ancient. Several U.S. craft brewers have adopted these methods to produce wild/sour beers, among these is Maine's Allagash brewery which does have a coolship although they also produce beers using more typical methods. I think I can get inoculant from Allagash's coolship, they are roughly 60 miles from me so they should have a fairly similar ambient microbiome to my home although there is probably a considerable extra amount of their house strain* of Saccharomyces cerevisiae in their air.
Does this sound like a viable way to jump start a new sourdough starter? If I get really ambitious I may start a second starter sans inoculant at the same time as a comparison/control.
*there are several other breweries within a half mile of Allagash so there are probably diverse strains of cultured Saccharomyces cerevisiae in the air although theirs should be present in by far the greatest numbers.
From what I understand, most sourdough cultures start off based on the yeast and LAB bacteria in the flour. Overtime, the bacterial flora shifts from the culture found in the flour, to those found locally. Thus, build your starter, leave the lid off, feed it, and all of the local beasties should end up in your culture. Not all may survive as yeast + LAB tend to exclude most other biotics.
Most beer you buy, if not all beer, is pasteurised so there will be no live cultures in it. Just like when bread is baked the cultures are killed off.
As for picking any up from the air... The common belief nowadays is when you make a starter you're cultivating it from the flour itself. I suppose environment will play a part in some degree or other but won't play a part in your success rate in jump starting a starter. The best thing to do for jump starting it is to wet some flour :)
Although your comment is technically correct, at least up to the "if not all" part, it isn't quite on the money. Many craft beers are bottle conditioned which do rely on live yeast to provide the CO2 for carbonation. This may or may not be the same yeast strain used in the primary fermentation. Mass production lager breweries like Budweiser or Miller do generally pasteurize their beers but these are the Wonder Bread of beer and IMO not worth drinking.
What I'm talking about is taking inoculant not from the bottle but direct from Allagash's coolship or fermentor, although inoculant from Cantillon, Boon or Girardin bottles might be interesting as well but these may indeed be pasteurized. Getting away with not pasteurizing is much easier if the beer only contains good old Saccharomyces.
I'm not qualified to speak to the issue of whether or not sourdough cultures derive their micro ecology primarily or entirely from the flour or ambient fungi and bacteria, although I would be very interested in scientific references on the subject. Sour/wild beer is another matter, the wort is boiled before it goes into the coolships so assuming that vessel itself is clean to begin with the microorganisms that ferment the beer are indeed ambient. Another aside that may be of interest is that most of Belgian sour beer brewing is done in the winter as many brewers believe that fewer undesirable organisms are present, a more favorable ambient micro ecololgy if you will. In some cases the sour beers may be aged in wood barrels which can be another source of fungi and bacteria but metal coolships and fermenters are reasonably easy to sanitize if the brewer so chooses.
It is an interesting thought experiment, making connections between the differences in yeasted and sourdough breads and "standard" and wild fermented beers, and there is a lot to think about (and also enjoy) in wild fermentation on both fronts...but why the need to "jump start" a sourdough starter??? While there are certainly parallels in the wild fermentation of beer and bread, why not let the conditions of your sourdough culture facilitate the development of the organisms best fit for those conditions?
Do sourdough cultures somehow need something they don't already have?
On the other hand, go ahead and give it a shot and see what happens - no harm in experimenting...but I would imagine there might be some shift from the sour beer culture to the stabilized sourdough culture that developes, given the different conditions.
More importantly, I can't get any of my beloved sour beers in SE Idaho...help!!!
Back in the day, bakers had the choice of using brewers yeast, or creating their own culture. I bet it would work. Afterall, beer is simply liquid bread.
Having dabbled in an amateurish way at home brewing myself, I find your question really interesting. Something you might consider researching is what are the grains used in the wort that will be feeding the culture you hope to utilize. After all if there are 400+ different strains of beer yeast around, there's a good chance that happened because of the different strains of barley, wheat, rice, and corn used in particular locales favored the emergence and dominance of the particular strains. A little bit of barley helps our flour but a lot of beer has 50% and more barley so the culture may not be optimal for wheat flour. Danger: it might be possible to over think this aspect.
Another project for you to research while you're not clearing snow from your driveway this winter is how to create and maintain a "barm" which, if I recall correctly, is a yeast culture obtained from ale production that can be used in bread making and has its roots in England.
On the other hand, you could just order a starter from King Arthur during the halftime of the Pats game and be starting a sourdough loaf by Saturday.
Jim
It was supposed to be ellipsis rather than a period at the end of the subject line
Hi Jim, thanks for responding.
It seems to me that the exterior of an intact kernel of wheat as being almost as different an environment from a high hydration AP flour dough mass as it is from a liquid wort derived from 60% malted barley and 40% unmalted wheat. I guess I look at the orders of magnitude more massive surface area of the coolship as a potential vehicle to capture something interesting that traditional sourdough cultures might not "grab". Ideally I'd like to have samples from the Belgian lambic breweries rather than the newer and much more "sanitary" Allagash facility but I'll work with what I can get. It may well turn out that the end result is more-or-less the same as a traditionally built starter but it is all conjecture at this juncture.
Here is a link to a paper that has fed my interest:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0035507
Curiously, at least some of the Belgian coolships are constructed of copper (all American examples that I'm aware of are stainless steel).
is just as fun as making SD bread. Hops is very bitter but using it to make a hops SD starter is a nice cross over between the two as well. I personally didn't like the bread a hops starter made and probably why it isn't a starter of choice of the home baker.
One thing is for sure about SD starters. Once they are stable with what ever kind of yeast and LAB they have living well together in the culture, it is very difficult, really impossible, for commercial yeast introduced from the outside to take over. They can handle the low pH. The established culture has a huge head start from a LAB point of view too. When the culture is fed with flour, the microorganisms in it are to few and inactive to really have much of a chance in overthrowing the hoard of well established defenders and anything introduced by air has even less chance. Not to mention a well established culture is almost impossible to kill off as well.
That doesn't mean a weak starter or one in a new environment with new food and feeding regimen can't become populated with something else over a long period of time or a new combination of something else. I'm sure SD cultures have more than one acid loving yeasts and LAB in them living perfectly well together too.