Bavarian Sourdough Starter-Yeasted Ale

I think I should say really quickly, without delving too deeply into the history of beer specifically or beers/ales/gruits/melomels/etc as a general class of fun grain or seed drinks that contain alcohol, that what I brew almost never meets the criteria for the “beer label. This is because I almost never use hops, and, frankly, I almost never use malt either. Hops and malt are basic requirements for most people when the word “beer” is used, so I usually don’t use it and instead call my brews ale. I also tend to use that word in an older, currently non-standard way than it gets used now, since ale normally refers to brews that use specific types of yeast and top ferments to most contemporary brewers. Beer refers to different yeasts than ale uses and employs bottom fermentation for most contemporary brewers. I notice that the majority of beer brewers can be a little fussy about which word is used to describe various beer-like beverages, so I use “ale” instead of picking the contemporary word that fits whichever brew I made in the given situation. I guess I should write a Monday post on how brewing happens for me, because it’s very fluid and decidedly not in keeping with standard contemporary home-brewing methodologies. I’ll have There you go, homebrewers: a disclaimer that will make this a little less “what the heck?!” when you see how I do things.

Legit, this is the face most homebrewers make when I explain how I brew. It’s probably the same face y’all are already making if you brew, and that face will somehow magnify in intensity as you read on.

Next, I want to explain a bit about why I decided to learn brewing, and specifically this type of brewing. Because what I typically do doesn’t make any sense at all without a bit of context. But to be clear, I only make contemporary brews if Ross asks me to, which to date has only happened once.

When Harvey hit Houston, y’all know all about the fallout from that. Other areas as affected or worse didn’t get as much attention or funding, which at best is tragically unfortunate. Where I lived didn’t flood, though everything 300m around me did. We didn’t even lose internet or electricity, actually, which surprised me. But what I did lose was my belief that it’s possible for me to store enough water if a situation that grave or worse did affect me personally. Instead of maintaining any focus on having “enough” water, I decided both that I’d just go on ahead and keep a two week supply and that it was most important to have practiced, low-tech skills to make gross water safe. More typically, I refer to “gross water” as “bilge water.” As such:

This is an example of bilge water. This is also one of the cleaner examples I’ve seen pictures of. This is also sometimes what post-hurricane water looks like. I imagine you don’t want to drink this anymore than I do!!

There are a lot of ways to purify water, and I already had other ways to do so. But, it did occur to me that had my situation been bad, I may have needed to clean up icky water, potentially for weeks or months. Once that occurred to me, I figured that a good filtering of the water followed by fermentation is a great way to do it, since fermentation of water sources documentably helps eradicate potential pathogens.

So… I did not learn to brew because I cared about brewing. I care about water safety. I really do like brewing, though! I still don’t really care about brewing, though I definitely enjoy it in the moment.

I also didn’t learn how to do any kind of normal brewing for a couple of years after I’d gotten started on this. Because I don’t care about brewing; I care about water safety.

It is a fact that in serious emergency situations, you generally can’t just run to the store and grab what you need. Those of you who have people dealing with the aftermath of Ida right now, or who are dealing with or have dealt with any kind of natural disaster, know what I mean. You’re not gonna find fancy yeasts, hops, and … well, any kind of malt in that situation, so I figured it’d be best to learn it without.

And that’s what I did. I learned to brew using exclusively wild foraged ingredients. If you’ve never foraged before, here’s a video that Gina sent (she clearly could tell I needed to relax with some beautiful scenery, effective foraging, and beautifully cooked yums) that has foraging in the beginning. My process is more chaotic, because I’m more of a free-range forager than a homesteaded one.

What I normally use in place of malted grain is unmalted dock seed. Not usually the type of dock in the link, but they’re all edible. Sometimes I use crabgrass seed, or other random grass seeds, and occasionally I’ll use some bran or germ either solo or in tandem with foraged grains if I either don’t have time to forage or have time to forage enough.

In this specific instance, I used a litre each of bran and dock seed. I’m pretty sure it’s the first time I’ve used bran at all after that first year.

Most of the time I also either use pine needles or juniper fronds in there. That gives a nice flavor in addition to preventing souring. I also tend to use a wide array of not-hops herbs. Most of the time, I include a bit of mugwort (not too much or you have to listen to people tell you about the crazy dreams they had after drinking your brew) and some yarrow (not too much or people get headaches). I generally will also include some combination of mint, coriander, allspice, star anise, regular anise, fennel, creeping charlie (not the ivy one; the one you can eat), ginger, and other culinary or medicinal herbs. It’s all very fluid for me, and I decide based on my mood, the effect I’m looking for, and the flavor I’m looking for. Mostly mood, though. Whatever is going in, though, I toss it in a strainer bag, close the bag and then into my 8-quart pressure-canner-that-doesn’t-have-a-good-lid with water.

Just so y’all know ahead of time, I am going to straight up copy and paste some of this into the larger tutorial. I’ve already realized this, so might as well disclose it.

Most of what’s coming next is in captions to the pictures.

This time was dock, bran, and mint. I was feeling pretty lazy. Let that boil for a couple of hours. It’ll be fine.

This is what it looks like after it’s done. Sometimes it’s darker, and that’s usually because I use a lot more seed when I’m not randomly brewing without adequate supplies or the will to procure them.

At this point, pull out your strainer bag and use stout, leathery hands or a set of tongs to squeeze out as much of the liquid from the bag as you can. Or don’t; it’s up to you. Usually I do, at least a bit. I understand that some people don’t do that basically ever, but I’m more hit-or-miss. In this instance, I gave the bag a couple good squeezes, shrugged, and tossed it in the sink to clean up when I was done with the rest.

Turns out I needed to say stuff that isn’t encompassed in the pictures. Mostly because I took fewer pictures than I thought I did. I forget about pictures most of the time, and often have to make a recipe multiple times until I remember to get pics for y’all. In fact, I was going to have these amazing crab cakes up for y’all next week, and then…

Anyway. Once it’s out, you can either wait until it’s cooled to around blood temp (98.6F on average, though mine is 97.3), or you can add your sugar source now. Generally speaking, don’t just dump some sugar in there. Use molasses, or sugar syrup, or brown sugar syrup, or honey, or whatever. But not just sugar and stir. That seems like a real pain, though I suppose if you need to do it that way, it’s your brew so you should do what you need to. This is also where you add any other flavorings, like more pine, or whatever herbs.

In this case, I used syrup made while candying Bradford pears. Yes, those awful, invasive trees do sometimes make pears, and gathering them matters so that the birds don’t spread seed further. I’d had most of this syrup for a couple of years, and honestly I just want the jar back so I’ll be brewing with pear syrup exclusively until I exhaust my massive supply.

I decided that because I did want to use up a good amount of syrup and I did not want to hear Ross ask me why I prefer to make stupendously weak brews (it’s so the kid can drink them without me feeling like a bad parent), I decided to make it strong. STROOOOOOONNNG. You can see, in the pic below, the big jar of syrup. I used about a litre, based on eye-balling.

Anyway, your sugar source goes in whenever you decide it does. But once it’s at blood temp or cooler, it needs to go in. So too does your yeast. Most people use purchased brewing yeasts here, but I do not. I either use sourdough starter or I let it wild yeast itself.

This time, I used the Bavarian starter. I chose it because I had a lot I wanted to use up without baking bread or yeasted pastries. I put that in there, stirred, tossed a cloth over the pot, then wandered off to do whatever else I needed to in the moment. When I remembered that it was all sitting there waiting for me, I poured it into the little gallon jug you see below, topping it with an airlock. I don’t always use airlocks; I only use them when I want a higher ABV. When I don’t use an airlock, I just use a cork. When there’s a cork, I’m looking for roughly the same ABV you get from kombucha. So not very strong at all.

This guy got really jazzy on his litre of syrup. I spent the first 3 weeks thinking that it was going to overflow onto the plate because it was like this or sometimes more vigorous that entire time. Normally they don’t stay jazzy quite so long.

This is around 5-6 weeks into the process. For me this really never takes this long. I normally let them go a week, two max, because that’s all the need to get still. Gonna be a strong one!

All that stuff on the bottom is the sourdough starter and the bits of bran and dock fibre left in the brew.

Here are my 5 bottles (4 solid bottles, one partial bottle with lots of sediment still present). One of them wasn’t full. These turned out so pretty!!

And yes, they were strong. Ross doesn’t drink a ton, but he’s a giant and can hold his alcohol well. He ended up deciding to mix smaller amounts of this with regular beer, because he said a full bottle of this made him a bit loopy and that, understandably, made him uncomfortable.

If that is also not the effect you’re looking for, don’t use so much sugar. 1-2 cups is fine.

You can condition these in the pantry for however long you want. Conditioning means you just leave it there to sit and think about who it wants to be until you’re ready to drink it. You can also drink them immediately. It’s your call!

I don’t remember what these last bits are called in modernity, but they used to be called emptins. That’s what I call them. I use these to make bread with, and in this case there was a lot so I made 2 loaves for crouton-making.

Happy brewing!

The Actual Recipe for this Ale, in Normal Format

1 litre each: bran, dock seed (you can sub in any grains, do all bran, whatever you want)*

1 tablespoon or so of dried mint (optional: use a scant quarter cup of fresh)

Add any spices or herbs you also want in there (I was too lazy to do that)

3-4 cups of sugar syrup (you can do this as a simple syrup, flavored or not, or you can use honey, molasses thinned down, or brown sugar to make your syrup)

2 cups sourdough starter (this is a lot more than I normally use, since I normally max out at a cup, but there was a lot that I wanted to use up)

* If you are particularly concerned about the starch-to-sugar conversion that’s lacking when you don’t use malt, you can add amylase, which is an enzyme made in your spit. You can also crush up beano, which I’ve tried before and it works fine.

Boil your grains and mint (ideally in something to make them easier to strain out) in about 2 gallons of water. You can boil this for as long or short a time as you feel like doing, but I generally go 2-3 hours. Strain out your grains and herbs. At this time, you can either add the sugar or you can wait until it’s around the same temperature as your skin or a bit warmer.

Once it’s roughly blood temp, add your sugar if you haven’t already, then add your yeast. Give it a good stir, but don’t go all crazy with it. I generally let it sit like that until it’s showing some signs of activity, but not always. It’s really your call. Put in a 1-gallon jug and top with an airlock if you want a stronger brew, or a cork if you don’t. Put a plate under it, no matter what, in case there’s some overflow. It happens sometimes when the fermentation is particularly vigorous.

You will leave this sitting somewhere until it’s either still (done fermenting) or really close to still. Then you can bottle it. If you want to ensure your beer is bubbly when you open it, put in a bit of honey or sugar before you add the brew. A teaspoon per 12-16oz bottle is plenty good. Use bottles that are rated for fermentation, please, because no one likes it when glass explodes in their face.

Once you’ve bottled your beer, you can put it in a cool, dark place to smooth out more over the coming weeks, or you can toss it in the fridge now to cool down before drinking!