Sour Flavor Additive

I occasionally make soured mash to add to batches of beer for several reasons. I would most often make a simple starter, sour it over a couple days and then pitch it into the kettle for flavor. However, I wanted something that would be more consistent, for experimentation, and that I could add either into the mash (for ph adjustment), to the boil kettle (for flavor). I also wanted to be able to add to the fermenter, primary or secondary, if I chose, while still knowing how much sourness I would get and without worrying about the antiseptic nature of the hops slowing down the process.

I started with a gallon starter of about f 1.044 gravity (1 pound of Pale DME to one gallon of water just to keep things simple).



I cooled it to about 100 degrees, then transferred it into a small cooler that I keep for souring wort. I added a couple ounces of raw grain to this to inoculate with lactobacillus and then covered it with plastic wrap (directly on top of the liquid) to keep out oxygen.



I let this sit for three days and opened it daily to check the temperature and add a small amount of boiling water to bring the temperature back up to around 85 to 95 as needed.



Once it had soured nicely I canned the liquid in small pint mason jars. Though a gallon is eight pints, I only filled seven jars because my canner can process only seven jars at a time. You will notice that I used a water bath canner instead of a pressure canner. Do not do this with regular wort. Regular wort is not acidic enough and you can end up with something toxic! The Department of Agriculture guidelines for canned foods sets a threshold of 4.6 ph. Anything below this can be canned in a water bath canner. Anything above this needs pressure to hit the proper temperatures. My wort was well below 4.6 (thank you lactobacillus) so I opted for the easier method--since I don't own a pressure canner.




I now have seven pints jars of soured wort that I can safely add at anytime in the process and because it was canned there is no need to boil or otherwise sanitize it.

Nice job!! Hey but how much sour flavor can you get from one pint for say a 5.5 gallon batch?

I'm working out the specifics of how much to add at a time. I pitched a pint into a Foreign Extra Stout to test and am just starting to get some lacto character out of it. I found on one earlier experiment that a flavor that is almost undetectable in unfermented wort can be quite strong when finished and the sugars are taken out of the way, so I started small. I made pints, because I want to make some smaller batches to experiment with and found the small size best--they also store better. One other advantage, if I drop and break one, a pint is far easier to clean up than a quart. If I need to add more I can simply pitch two or more jars into a batch.

It will also depend on how strong the batch is. A batch at 5% ABV that finishes dry is going to need far less than a batch of 8% ABV that finishes sweet. If I find pints just don't cut it then next time I'll use larger jars and go bigger.

Cool thanks for the info. I've been wanting to make a Gose for a while now and this like a good way of going about it.