MuteDog

You likely have a contamination in your equipment somewhere. Try deep cleaning and pasteurize everything you possibly can, replace o-rings and gaskets etc.

ahh, ok, you said equal amounts of vinegar and whiskey so I was calculating it as being ~1/3rd beer and ~1/3rd whiskey. I’d still recommend just putting your yeast source into hopped wort and letting it ferment.

When I do wild captures, I generally put the potential yeast source into some hopped starter wort and wait to see if it ferments. Here’s how I captured yeast from decomposing leaf litter.

What’s your reasoning behind your process here? Assuming the beer is 5% abv and your whiskey is 40% then your resulting mixture is going to be like 15% abv, that’s a really difficult environment for most yeast, especially wild yeast. I’ll be surprised if you get anything from this.

A number of years back someone posted the idea of pumpkin gin to the homebrewing subreddit. Supposedly some senator arguing against prohibition in the early 1900s claimed you could just hollow out a pumpkin, fill it up with sugar and you’d end up with booze. So I gave it a try. One pumpkin I filled up with apple juice and another I filled with brown sugar. The apple juice pumpkin actually fermented and I got a somewhat drinkable hard cider out of the deal. the sugar one just turned to sludge and grew mold.

Another thing I tried was to make my own amylase producing mold using millet and rice cakes and ginger root to inoculate it. They grew mold (some of it white, some of it green) and I used them to inoculate some steamed rice that sort of fermented. It went sour of course, and it ended up tasting a lot like lemon juice, so I must have gotten some citric acid producing mold in the mix as well.

You could probably grow horehound or costmary in pots on a porch or deck, I grow them in my garden but I don’t think their root system is too huge and they don’t get big like mugwort or gigantic like hops. Obviously coriander works in pots, so that’s another option.