Sourdough Bread with Heady Topper and Hill Farmstead Yeast

I recently spent a week in Vermont with some cheese monger friends. We went up there as a sort of reunion/vacation and to visit the birthplaces of some of our favorite cheeses. Once all our planes had landed, Eddie (yup, that Eddie) had a stroke of brilliance and checked the weather. There was a warning out for a big winter snow storm. We drove out to our cabin and found it already covered in snow - and more was falling. What happens when five dude cheese mongers/craft beer enthusiasts get snowed into a cabin together? Most of it we agreed never to speak of... but what I can share are the grand tales of overindulgence. We overindulged.

Anyway, we decided to start saving the yeast sediment from some of the funky beers we drank to use as a sourdough starter. Sediment from the following was included: Yazoo Deux Rouges, HF Biere de Norma, and Heady Topper, just to name a few. The funky dregs all went into a mason jar, along with a small ball of dough and some maple syrup to get the bugs all active again.  A couple of days in, the little culture was very active so we busted out the flower and got to work. We wrote the final bread recipe down on a journal page which may or may not have included drawings of our souls and of a shrine which may or may not have been built to hold the dough while it rose. We were snowed in.

Ultimately we just weighed the liquid yeast and subtracted its weight from the weight of hot water to be added to the flour. We let the dough rise for about 10 hours, before leaving it in the fridge overnight and kneading then baking it the following evening. As delicious as it was with some Vermont Creamery Maple Butter, it wasn't as sour as I was hoping it would be.