This goes with @Ratman's thread about sourdough yeast.  I started making mead last year. Only have 4 gallons under my belt. I just started beekeeping,  so i should start having an endless supply of honey starting next year,  the maine book about mead making i read is 'How to make mead like a viking'. I been lazy and busy about it. So i decided to start today. I took some local honey (not mine) and mixed it in a bucket with water. I started with a small amount, just to see how it goes, but i can add to it as i go. I mixed it together into a 'must', and covered it with cheesecloth.  So bugs dont get into it. Plus once the bees find it, they WILL collect it all.but now its the waiting game. I will check in a week. I have it hanging on a post, about 6ft in the air, so my chickens dont go into it. I will keep this updated. I plan on making some more mead soon. And ither alcoholic drinks,  as the wild apples will be coming into hatvest inna few months.

Definitely interested in your experience with this.  I've never done wild fermentation.

I will definitely keep u posted. Its dgonna be an interesting experiment.  Seems easy. But we shall see

I learned around christmas that traditionally gingerbread leavening comes from a sort of honey sourdough. So something approaching that sort of honey must and they would keep it alive until it was time to make gingerbread.

It was documentary about gingerbread internationally I haven't chased down more information about that yet but I thought that was pretty cool. Honey yeast seem to get along like a house on fire  ;D

The fact that you can actually get yeast this way is pretty cool. Makes sense though.

I actually took a peek this morning, but dropped the bucket, and spilled some. Its because i am impatient.  But there is enough to get started. I will be leaving it alone till the end of the week. I was told,  i would get in trouble if i was caught peeking at it again. Lol. 

Quick story, from last year.

When i worked at the grocery store,  i had a customer come in. One of those eccentric locals, that everyone knows. Lol. I had juat started researching collecting yeast. This customer during covid19, was looking for yeast.  We were out for months of it, among other items. Well i told her to do it like the Vikings,  and collect it, and thats what i am getting ready to do. Same with sourdough, just a slightly different process.  Well this lady said i was lying, to stop bullshitiing.  That i was a liar in thos exact words. Then rather loud, so people can hear. Lol. It was a wtf moment. I defended myself and told her that many cultures around the world did it, that you couldnt go into the store and purchase it 500 years ago. just walked away, i had a broom in my hand, as i was busy sweeping the store.

people don't realise that the air we breathe is simply loaded with spores and pollens and micro organisms of all kinds. Just floating around.
And yeasts are one of the most common.

What might be a better idea, would be to have a half dozen starters going.
And pick the best.

You never know what you'll get in a wild culture, so having a few starters to chooses from would give you more choice when using it in your main brew.

They might all taste the same, or might not. But I think I'd definitely go for a bunch on little starters and pick the one that tasted best.

At least with honey you are unlikely to get any moulds - honey is a fantastic preservative and will keep the moulds and bacteria at bay. 

Cool experiment :thumb:

Love that you have to keep the bees out as well :-)

I will be checking up on it, in the next couple of days. I believe if this goes well, kn the future.  I can get your idea,. Then have a bunch of starters, i dont have much space inside, so hopefully the one will start soon. So i can get experience

Here is an update on my captured WILD yeast. I took a bucket, put some raw local honey, mixed with water to make a MUST. I covered it with cheesecloth and set it outside. Usually after a couple days. It can get pulled down. But when i went to check it. I dropped the bucket, and lost most of it. So i had to start over. I guess thats what i get for being impatient lol. I left it out for almost 2 weeks. I bought it in, and strained it into a 1 gallong carboy. Then put an airlock on top to let it breathe some more.  Well its almost 2 months old. And what i do it not by the books, but it works for me. I feed it about 2 tsp of honey every 3 to 6 days. Then i sit and mix it, vigorously once a day for 20 minutes.  ( you are supposed to mix it mutiple times a day. Up to 5 or 6 times. But i dont have the time to do that often. ) it has a foam on top which is good. I wont get into technical terms. But the carbonation and froth is from the yeast actively eating the honey. Now in the pics i only added about 3 or 4 cups of water to the must, which in the container it has grown almost double in size, due to feeding it honey.  After mixing you can hear it bubbling( which the Vikings thought it was magic pixies were at work) it also has an amazing alcoholic smell. Technically u could drink this must. Which i might try in the future as a test.  I plan on collecting wild apples and making some hard cider, and ciser( apple mead) this fall.  Wild fermentation SO FAR has been fun. I joke with my gf and tell her i gotta take care of the baby, and feed the baby. Lol. Drives her crazy.

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In the tradition of the vikings. I carved a small stick, and am using it as my stir stick,  exclusively.  Thwy would pass it down from generations because the yeast will dry up on the stick and go inactive for year, until its mixed with watwr and honey to start mead.

WOOT!  Sounds (and looks) like it's going well so far.  Very cool man! :thumb:

I'll just mention one thing.  The dedicated "stirring stick" is a cool tie to the past.  But that's ultimately going to be a great way for bacteria and other things that could spoil the mead to get in there.  It's your batch though, so entirely up to you.  Just wanted to drop a warning on that.

Looking forward to see how this turns out.  :)

Its actually doing very well. I appreciate the heads up. I was definitely not gonna save it and pass it down. At my rate i wont have children till iam 95, and i am 35 now, so its a long way off. Lol, i plan to just keep carving a new one every 3 or 4 months. Living on a homestead,  its kind of hard to keep stuff clean. I plan on doing a taste test soon, but i don't like drinking it with it being a million degrees. Hopefully in aweek i can do it. But we shall see. I am about to put in an order for local honey and get 15lbs. Just so i can be prepared for when i start a few different ones this fall.

between the alcohol and honey - the stick is pretty much sterilised each time it's used, I would think.

Yeasts are alcohol tolearant - well some are. So regularly use of the stick would probably kill off anything but the more alcohol tolearant yeasts.

It's not necessarily as daft an idea as it sounds :-)

And if you stored it in a jar of honey that would keep it sterile.

Might also be interesting to see what happened with just the honey and yeast, no water.
Would you get a thick  alcoholic honey ?
Probably not :-)

The other thing is that you probably have more than one strain of yeast in your wild mead.
Over the years the lower alcohol tolerant yeasts would die off and the mead would gradually get stronger as the more alcohol tolerant ones survived and flourished and stuck to the stick.

It's a bit like people who say that our ancestors only used salt to cure their meat, so why should we use nitrates.

In reality, over time people would graduate towards salt from a particular mine or area because it did a better job. And that would be the salts naturally rich in nitrates.

So over the years the stirring stick might well end up making stronger mead :-)
More than enough reason to keep it in the family.

Or not :-)
But it does make sense.

Our ancestors weren't idiots and many long standing traditions have a practical core to them.  

Did you take the specific gravity of the starting mix ?
be interesting to know how much alcohol you get.

A stirring stick isn't really used once there's alcohol.  When fermentation happens, dead yeast and other solids will sink to the bottom.  And this is desired.  At that point it's a normal practice to move the liquid (usually via siphon) to another container leaving the solids behind.  Stirring the batch would just put everything back in suspension again.  Which would be drinkable, but you'd have a very "yeasty" tasting mead.

As to whether the alcohol will keep things sanitary, that entirely depends on the percentage of alcohol.  Having a higher level of alcohol definitely helps protect from outside infections, but any homebrewer will tell you that even a beer with 10% ABV can get infected and spoiled.

Keeping a stick in honey would keep it safe while it's in the honey.  As soon as it's taken out and diluted in water, it won't be anymore.

Yeast will not ferment honey by itself.  While sugar is their food, and is provided by the honey, yeast need other things to be happy and healthy.  Just like any other living organism they need oxygen, certain minerals, etc.  They will not get this from honey.  Yeast also don't do well in an environment that is too sugar rich.  They can get overwhelmed and a good fermentation won't start.

it was just a thought :-)

I dont have any of the tools to check the gravity, (alchol level) but i seen them cheap on Amazon.  I pretty much goe bu smell, and taste. Which it smels strongly of alcohol.  Which we just opened one of the 1st bottles i made, not knowing what the level is, i can tell it is rather strong. Which probably goes against all the science that people learn the hobby. But iam the type of person who doesnt really care too much on the specifics of the science. As long as i have a very basic understanding,  and it goes according to plan. I am good. I usually am happy with just getting the end product done, and good.

Perhaps a stupid idea but this seems very similar to sourdough starter so maybe this could be used for sweet breads like a honey nut bread or cake?

Yes actually JW. I haven't seen it done but I saw a documentary about traditional gingerbreads used a sort of honey based sourdough starter.

perpetualstudent wrote on Sep 7^th, 2021 at 1:30pm:

Yes actually JW. I haven't seen it done but I saw a documentary about traditional gingerbreads used a sort of honey based sourdough starter.

Ok cool interesting concept

The specific gravity test is just a graduated tube with a float.

Alcohol is less dense than water, so the float is higher in the tube the more alcohol is produced.
Or the other way round - I can't be bothered to look it up :whistle:

If you take a reading before fermentation and after its fairly easy to work out the percentage of alcohol.

Given how easy and cheap it is to do, why wouldn't you ?

On a separate note, wonder if gingerbread was used to make ginger wine ?
Probably not but maybe...

Just like u, i can be just as lazy.  One of those things. As long as i get a buzz and can smell the alcohol. Iam good. Its another skill i learned, so when the apocalypse happens, i have barter items.

Speaking of wild yeast, I watched "victorian farm" (available on prime) the premise is 3 people live and work with victorian english tech, experimental archeology type thing. One experiment was gingerbeer using yeast from beer barm. They said it came out really well.

So I'm trying an experiment using my wife's sourdough. Same gingerbeer I used last time only with a tablespoon and a half of sourdough instead of an 1/8 tsp of bread yeast. Been brewing about 24 hours, yeast seem alive. We'll see how it goes.

Please keep us posted on that, sounds very interesting.  I think next year we might attempt starting a sourdough starter. So gar my yeast starter has been doing great.  I am getting ready to make 5 gallons of mead, and 4 to 8 gallons of hard apple cider. Which the latter only takes 4 to 8 weeks to finish.

well it certainly carbonated, the plastic bottle is nice and hard until I let some of the pressure off. Tasted it, it's still early, you can taste what my wife calls a "bready" flavor and I call "umami". But the key is it tastes just like last batch I made. I don't have a flavor difference between the sourdough and the bread yeast versions. And that batch after some more fermentation lost that flavor entirely. So we'll let it go longer.

vetryan15 wrote on Sep 16^th, 2021 at 6:50am:

Please keep us posted on that, sounds very interesting.  I think next year we might attempt starting a sourdough starter. So gar my yeast starter has been doing great.  I am getting ready to make 5 gallons of mead, and 4 to 8 gallons of hard apple cider. Which the latter only takes 4 to 8 weeks to finish.

You might also look into amish friendship bread. It’s really good.

Do u have an airlock ? U could make one with a regular balloon,  poke a pin size hole in it, and put the ballon as the lid, it will release the Co2. Through the pin hole without allowing anything in. Cuz it can blow up with no vent on it. Definitely let it sit for a couple of months minimum.  My mead is gonna be sitting for 6months minimum, before I i even think of bottling it,

Morphy wrote on Sep 16^th, 2021 at 2:32pm:

vetryan15 wrote on Sep 16th, 2021 at 6:50am: Please keep us posted on that, sounds very interesting.  I think next year we might attempt starting a sourdough starter. So gar my yeast starter has been doing great.  I am getting ready to make 5 gallons of mead, and 4 to 8 gallons of hard apple cider. Which the latter only takes 4 to 8 weeks to finish. You might also look into amish friendship bread. It’s really good.

Never heard of that. But i got plenty of local amish around

friendship bread is basically a very sweet bread that uses pudding. Ultimately it's a type of sourdough my family did it when I was a kid but I don't remember much.

The ginger beer is done. There are a few differences between this and the last batch. Took longer to ferment (though that might have been weather).Produced more sediment. I got a bitter taste when it was done. I'm not sure if it was the source of yeast, the flour that came with the yeast, the ginger itself being older, the extra peppercorns I added or what.

It was an interesting and drinkable experiment. My sister told me I have too high standards and it tasted great with peach whiskey. I'm not sure. More experiments ahead for sure.

Joe has more experience with the different flavors.  So many things can cause the variations its really hard to pinpoint it. Thats the fun part just experimenting. 

I juat got my 5 galloms of mead started, all different flavors, in 1 gal jugs.i got regular mead, apple ciser, spiced apple ciser( we went out and harvested wild apples on my street) vanilla mead,( which was real vanilla extract as flavoring. And a maple mead. In the spring i tap our own mappe trees and make our own syrup.  Not much, but we enjoy it. Really too labor intensive,  but it helps with cabin fever as our winters are 6 months long. 

Then i have 8 gallons of hard apple cider. In 4 gallon jugs. One is regular hard cider, other is spiced hard cider. We had harvested about 2 5gallon buckets of wild apples.  All the yeast that i used was what i captured for my yeast starter. Its been almost a week and everything is starting to bubble. Slowly, but at night when its quiet,  u can hear it all night long.  I domt heat up the must, and i don't mix the honey and water into (must) i read somewhere it makes it sweeter mead if u dont agitate it. So far in my experience.  I couldnt tell. But i know it tastes better thwn most wines i have drank in the past. Some of my techniques are what medieval times would do, due to no time. Just let it  do its thing.

I know when I ferment foods the type(s) of bacteria that predominate cause drastic changes in flavor. Ive had some that have a spicy kick. Others have this sour yet sweet and tangy flavor that is absolutely the best kraut you will ever have. Its almost addicting. I need to start saving starters from different batches for different flavor profiles.

Is it possible that different yeasts do this? If this was mentioned already my bad. Just occurred to me right now.

https://www.wildbeerco.com/updates/stories/article/wild-ipa-anniversary

This brewery started off by mashing the wort in open tanks and then opening the shutters to allow wild yeasts to float in.

Several years on they have now moved to a blend of yeasts.

I worked at the spire brewery here in Chesterfield. (Our crooked spire is famous ).

Dave, the owner and brewer maintained consistency by skimming the ferment and using that yeast in the next brew.

If you go to any home brew shop you will find a huge range of yeasts available.

So, in short yes our ancestors used whatever was floating around.

If you want consistency, sterility and standardised ingredients work.

Any experiments with wild yeast will lead to a minimum of 10% wastage, usually more.

Of the remaining  most will be drinkable some will be "interesting" and once every few years something stunning will come along.


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