Bug Farm Solera

A friend of mine, Jay, received a mixed culture of yeast and bacteria from a fellow known as Al B on the Burgundian Babble Belt. Al is a microbiologist and has put together a few of these mixed culture trades over the past couple years. He calls them Bug Farms. I believe he's also working on starting a commercial yeast company called East Coast Yeast. This particular Bug Farm contained the following:

Brettanomyces Drie Fontenein Oude Gueuze
Brettanomyces Fantome Black Ghost
Brettanomyces Russian River Beatification
Brettanomyces Vinnie's oak chips (RR)
B. anomulus WY
Brettanomyces Allagash Confluence
Brettanomyces (2) Cantillon St. Lamvinus
Pediococcus Cantillon St. Lamvinus
Pediococcus Rodenbach Foederbier
Saccharomyces fermentati Flor Sherry Yeast
S. cerevisae Saison Dupont
LF1 / LF2 New Belgium La Folie
Lactobacilli Sourdough / WL / WY
Kombucha yeast

Jay pitched and repitched this culture several times before giving some to me. I decided I wanted to do a sort of single vessel solera with the culture. A Solera is a series of vessels (often barrels) containing wines or sherries of different ages which are used to create a blended final product. When the blender removes wine from the oldest barrel he replaces it with wine from the next oldest barrel and so on until the youngest barrel receives only fresh wine (See wildBrews by Jeff Sparrow p.212). Some sour beer producers have recently started to employ this method.

In my system I will only have one vessel - a 3 gallon carboy. I plan to remove and blend a portion every 6 to 12 months and then top-up the carboy with fresh wort. Since the beer is destined to be part of a blend eventually, I decided to do a brew of 100% pale malt. This way I can decide whether I want the final beer to be light or dark and include any necessary specialty malts in the fresh brew.

Since the culture was being harvested from a high gravity, dark beer, I rinsed it with water that I boiled and then let cool. I then pitched it on a half gallon starter. I left the starter ferment for a couple days and in the mean time pitched a packet of 71B wine yeast (a susceptible white wine strain - read more about using wine yeast in beer here) on the wort I had brewed for the solera. I decided I wanted there to be some fresh yeast in the mix since this was about the 4th or 5th generation of the culture. I have heard that repitched mixed cultures may start to favor the lactic bacteria over time and become increasingly sour with each generation. A nice thick pellicle formed only a few days after pitching the starter into the full batch.

So my Bug Farm Solera is resting comfortably in the basement and I look forward to the first tasting and hopefully blending some time around December or January.