As I understand it, the souring of my beer is brought about by using a yeast that I harvested from one of my favorite beers. The brewery refers to it as being wild. I would say it makes more of a tart beer, than a full on sour. Am I correct in my understanding that the road to sour is varied, as in there's wild yeast, kettle souring using lactobacillus, or pitching lactobacillus and letting that be the primary fermenter with or without brett?
lots to cover there... a regular, clean, non-sour beer is made with only one microbe, either saccharomyces cerevisiae (ales) or saccharomyces pastorianus (lagers). sour or tart beers ("tart" just means mildly sour) involved the inclusion of a lactic acid bacteria ("LAB") such as lactobacillus or pediococcus. you'll also hear the term "funky" (or "horse blanket", or "goat", or "barnyard") thrown around, those flavors are the result of brettanomyces, a yeast (not bacteria) that is often referred to as "wild". there are other yeasts that also fall under "wild" but brett is by far the most common.
you are absolutely correct in saying that there are many ways to make a sour. you can do it with lacto only, and that can be done relatively quickly (ex: a kettle sour). if you use pedio, you need to use brett as well since pedio can product diacetyl and brett is required to clean that up. pedio and brett are generally slower-acting, so once you add those you are typically talking about months before the beer is ready.
And what is the difference between those and Barrel aging to get sour. I mean I get that the barrel become infected so is that good because it become a reliable source for souring.
quick-soured beers that use only lacto are, in my opinion, single-note beers. they have lactic acid and that's about it. giving the beer a few months with brett and other microbes results in a much more complex and interesting beer, IMO. you don't need to use a barrel - the beer can age just fine in a carboy, or any other vessel. barrels are convenient and plentiful, but they are not required. if you want to carry over bugs from one carboy to the next, toss in some oak cubes, chips or spirals then use those on subsequent beers.
so, to answer your question, quick-soured beers are, well, quick and (relatively) less interesting - that's certainly not to say that they aren't tasty. long-aged sour beers with a variety of bugs are more complex and many more flavors can be achieved, but the timeline is longer - months/years instead of days/weeks.
I see so many pictures where people are trying to determine whether they have a pellicle or an infection. I have never had a pellicle and I've used this wild yeast several times.
a pellicle merely indicated the presence of oxygen and pellicle-forming bugs (like brett). if you haven't experienced pellicles, it's either because there is no oxygen in your aging vessel (congrats!), you don't have pellicle-forming bugs in there, and/or sufficient time hadn't elapsed to form a pellicle.
what beer is your "wild yeast" from?
BTW, it's funny me how many brewing related words are incorrectly identified as spelling mistakes by the spellchecker this forum uses.
nit-pick: this forum doesn't use a spell-check, it's your browser that has one