If it's not obvious, beer and wine are my weak areas in the spirits world. That isn't to say that they're absent, just that I don't drink much of them.
But one thing I do use them for is cooking and baking. Recently I've been trying to create sourdoughs from bottle conditioned beers. After a couple of tries, I finally managed to culture a yeast and have been cranking out breads formed from yeasts not to be found in the grocery store or wild in the air of Minnesota.
If you're not familiar with sourdoughs, they're basically flour, water, and yeast. Natural starters will typically take a week to gather wild yeast from the air and then the fermentation begins. This is similar to the creation of lambic beers where the wort is exposed to the air and starts fermenting naturally.
The problem with the lambics strains has been that they ferment optimally at temperatures below the average temperature of a kitchen. Thus switching to a bottle conditioned porter did the trick. This is the Meantime London Porter, bottle conditioned to 6.5% abv.
The starter recipe is rather simple if you work in metric weight. One 750ml bottle of beer added to 1 kilogram of bread flour. Mix the two together and cover with plastic film. Stir about once a day and "feed" it with the same proportion of beer/water and flour to replace the sour that's used to make the bread.
The resulting breads aren't too boldly sour, but it is apparent that it's a sourdough and the flavors of the beer do survive into the final product.