Sourdough Culture/Starter from Beer

At the beginning of the summer (so, late May), I started a sourdough culture from the yeast left at the bottom of a bottle of Unibroue Grande Reserve 17. (The beer is a dark ale, very spicy and warm, with a combination of toffee and pumpkin pie spice mix smells and tastes.) I've always been hesitant about working with yeast--it seemed too temperamental and too, you know, fussy and unforgiving. But, I thought, we drink a lot of bottle-conditioned beer at my place, and there's a big colony of live yeast at the bottom of a bottle-conditioned beer. Regular beer doesn't have live yeast, but bottle-conditioned beers have another addition of yeast right before they're sealed (that's what makes them bottle-conditioned). Keeping live yeast fed seemed much easier than blooming dried yeast, or trying to colonize wild yeast. So, I started a sourdough colony from beer yeast.

This is the starter with a little hooch on top. It's been sitting in the fridge a few days.

I took the dregs of the bottle and poured them in a pyrex storage bowl, mixing in 1/3 cup all-purpose flour and 1/3 cup water. Whenever I feed the culture, I use this amount of flour and water.

I put a cover loosely on the bowl, and set it out on the counter for 24ish hours. I then poured off the "hooch" (the liquid that forms on top of the mixture--technically it's the yeast's waste), and fed the culture with flour and water. I waited 24ish hours, poured off the hooch, and fed it again. I repeated this for about seven days total. 

After seven days, I tried to make a pizza dough; it really didn't rise much at all, so I continued the daily feedings for another three days. 

On the tenth day, I made my first loaf of bread. Its rise was okayish, so at this point I considered the culture established enough to put in the fridge to hibernate between loafs.


Not surprisingly, the starter smells like beer.

A top view of the starter. You can see a bubble or two.

So now, 18-24 hours before I want to start making a batch of bread, I take the culture out of the fridge, and feed it flour and water. I put it on the counter for 18-24 hours, divide it (half in the mixing bowl), and feed it again to replenish what I took out. At this point, there will be a little hooch, and lots of bubbles throughout the starter (the hooch and the bubbles are signs that the yeast is alive and metabolizing). I leave it on the counter for another 18-24 hours, and then back in the fridge till next time. It will develop more hooch as it sits in the fridge (maybe about a quarter inch or so on top of the culture?). Apparently one needs to feed it about weekly to keep the yeast alive, but I've been making bread about once a week, eliminating the need to do a maintenance feed. 

I'll post later about my bread-making process. It's really, really easy to make a sourdough culture from live beer yeast. And it will make bread that tastes like the beer from which you made the culture.