Sourdough Saga

Here is my sourdough starter.

The brown liquid is called hooch. Hooch is the watery layer that contains alcohol. It smells beer like because it is a bit like beer. I read that some people use to drink it…however until you have made your own sourdough hooch, you will never know how disgusting the thought of drinking that stuff is.
It doesn’t hurt your sourdough starter. Before using it, I would just stir the starter to blend the hooch with the flour mixture. However, this particular day, I have too much hooch, so I would drain some of it off before stirring.
Through this Sourdough learning process I have come to learn a few vital things about myself. One is……if we were immediately required to live a 1800’s life, we would die because I am homemaking challenged 😉
I started out with regular bread flour and had the process running smoothly UNTIL I decided to switch to whole grain. I had ordered 50 lbs of grain and once it arrived I gradually started switching over my starter. Well, that didn’t work so well. My bread immediately went flat and gained a stronger sour flavor. I have since learned that you are NEVER supposed to switch food on your starter. If you start out feeding bread flour, don’t switch to another type of flour.
With that, I am trying not to despair. I have since made wonderful sourdough pancakes out of my starter, however I think I will start a new starter just on bread flour again since I know that works. I need to do further research on freshly ground whole grain sourdough and which type of grain would work best besides the recommend Rye grain.