Ever used real fruit for a beer, instead of extracts? I've done berries of various sorts, an apple cooked down first, and also fresh orange peel zests. Berries always worked out great, apple and orange zests never had enough effect... needed MORE.

Back in the day the goth kids just dumped beer and hard cider together for the lousy tasting and hangover inducing snakebite.

Daaaamn. So you're gonna floor malt, I guess?

Home malting sounds very hardcore and I salute you. How would you even go about extracting a wild yeast, much less having any idea if it would like the chow and the environment?

Figured I'd post this since everytime I mention it in the forums I get tons of questions. It's very easy to capture your own wild yeast. This is different than lambic brewing, since you can make "regular" styles with it (with a bit of a twist)! I love using the wild yeast I captured this way, it will eat its way thru anything.

Step 1) Clean & sanitize an empty glass jar.

Step 2) In it mix up a bit of DME with warm water. Not much, you want the gravity of the mixture to be 1.030 at most. You could try boiling it with a bit of hops, but I didn't do it that way.

Step 3) Leave it by an opened window until you start seeing bubbles and foam on top (I think it took me about 2 weeks). Awesome! Your culture of your local wild yeast is ready! You can now use it to start a beer!

How long you leave it out will affect what you get. If you use it right after you first start seeing signs of life (2 weeks) you will just get wild yeast. Leave it out longer and you will get other things in it. This is what happens (from Lambic by Guinard):

(3 to 7 days) Enteric Bacteria and Kloeckera Apiculata
(2 weeks) Saccharomyces
(3 to 4 months) Lactic Acid Bacteria
(8 months) Brettanomyces plus Pichia, Candida, Hansenula and Cryptococcus

Note that a group of microbes take over from the previous one, so for example, at two weeks, Saccaromyces has completely taken over and there is no Enteric Bacteria or Kloeckera left in your culture.

Ok well, now you know everything about capturing your own wild yeast! Hope it helped!

Added this to the wiki

Back in the day the goth kids just dumped beer and hard cider together for the lousy tasting and hangover inducing snakebite. Would doing it all at once be markedly different?

It's not just goth kids. That was a very common pub drink in London in the late 80's when I spent a bunch of time there. I'd assume it still is because they are still served in English pubs in LA. I've always kind of liked them and never noticed any greater hangover from them. I guess it depends on the quality of the cider and lager/stout you're using to make them. It's also not really all that different in concept from a shandy or radler.

Unrelated but cats' post reminded me that a local bartender told me that he's started brewing his own beer using 100% foraged ingredients. I didn't get a chance to ask him for many details but I do know that he uses wild mugwort in place of hops. Apparently that is how beer was made back in the olden days.

My girlfriend wants to start growing hops once we move to NY.