diff --git a/CHANGES.txt b/CHANGES.txt
index 084f30754af..df05a670596 100644
--- a/CHANGES.txt
+++ b/CHANGES.txt
@@ -110,6 +110,9 @@ New Features
 
 * SOLR-1815: SolrJ now preserves the order of facet queries. (yonik)
 
+* SOLR-1677: Add support for choosing the Lucene Version for Lucene components within
+  Solr. (Uwe Schindler, Mark Miller)
+
 Optimizations
 ----------------------
 
diff --git a/example/solr/conf/solrconfig.xml b/example/solr/conf/solrconfig.xml
index c043af91002..bfd53c3edf2 100755
--- a/example/solr/conf/solrconfig.xml
+++ b/example/solr/conf/solrconfig.xml
@@ -31,6 +31,14 @@
          -Dsolr.abortOnConfigurationError=false
      -->
   <abortOnConfigurationError>${solr.abortOnConfigurationError:true}</abortOnConfigurationError>
+  
+  <!--
+    Controls what version of Lucene various components of Solr adhere to. Generally, you want
+    to use the latest version to get all bug fixes and improvements. It is highly recommended 
+    that you fully re-index after changing this setting as it can affect both how text is indexed
+    and queried.
+  -->
+  <luceneMatchVersion>LUCENE_31</luceneMatchVersion>
 
   <!-- lib directives can be used to instruct Solr to load an Jars identified
        and use them to resolve any "plugins" specified in your solrconfig.xml or
diff --git a/src/java/org/apache/solr/core/SolrConfig.java b/src/java/org/apache/solr/core/SolrConfig.java
index d2c3bb245e8..dfcde299b3e 100644
--- a/src/java/org/apache/solr/core/SolrConfig.java
+++ b/src/java/org/apache/solr/core/SolrConfig.java
@@ -136,6 +136,7 @@ public class SolrConfig extends Config {
     
     booleanQueryMaxClauseCount = getInt("query/maxBooleanClauses", BooleanQuery.getMaxClauseCount());
     luceneMatchVersion = getLuceneVersion("luceneMatchVersion", Version.LUCENE_24);
+    log.info("Using Lucene MatchVersion: " + luceneMatchVersion);
 
     filtOptEnabled = getBool("query/boolTofilterOptimizer/@enabled", false);
     filtOptCacheSize = getInt("query/boolTofilterOptimizer/@cacheSize",32);