Quick Lambic

There's gotta be a quicker way to do this?

Adding sour to a quick fruit beer, or add sour and fruit to a quick ale, or some sort of super bacteria starter that you add wort to...

I pitched a flanders on my 8 month yeast cake from my first lambic, it had a good amount of sour character after a month. Actually kegged it and carbing it now. Nice blend of sweet and sour.

meh...just found this:

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/f36/lambic-95230/#post1035855

2 months is the quickest turnaround I've ever seen for a lambic, anyone else done similar?

The types of bugs that make a psuedo lambic just don't do their thing quickly. Can you sort of fake it by making a beer sour, sure, but it's not going to be anything like a Lambic. The fastest way to get sour is to add lactic acid.

You can make a beer sour in under a month.

Lambic isn't just sour. It is a complex blend of flavors. Time is an important ingredient that's hard to avoid. While I am convinced you could make something with some of the right flavors in a month or two it wouldn't be the same. It would be like the difference between a jello no-bake cheesecake and one make from scratch by a pastry chef. Both are enjoyable but the one from scratch will blow the other one away.

considering the cost difference and time commitment involved, those jello cheesecakes are pretty freaking awesome. Sure I can make one from scratch when I have the time and the money..but sometimes swmbo just wants a piece of cheesecake. we're not exactly lambic connoisseurs, so I'm sure we'd be fine with faking it for a while.

Honestly, I think a sour-mashed Berliner Weisse with raspberry syrup during serving would be a pretty good alternative.

My friend requested an apricot beer. Its fermenting right and when done ill add the extract at bottling. Half goes to him, half ill keep and ill add lactic acid to each glass (to taste) to make a sour wheat fruit beer. No it wont be complex, but a fast sour..

I can make a sour in 4 days.

Pitch Wy3944 or any other similarly explosive yeast, and dump in a bottle of lactic acid when you force carb it.

To borrow a quote: we're not making sour beer, we're making wild ales. It takes time. The quickest true sour would be a berliner wiess or a gose- there are a few recipes up for those, and you can add fruit (or syrup, as Bobby pointed out) to those.

As already noted, lambics take a very long time to become drinkable. I recently tasted 12 different batches of 1-2 month old lambic (homebrew club filled a barrel), and none of them were close to being drinkable yet.

I'd look into a Berliner Weisse or even a Sour Saison as a good alternative to lambic. To get the sourness quickly, use a sour mash, acidulated malt, or just plain ol' latic acid. All of those methods will get you sourness very quickly, but I find that the sour mash produces the best results.

Here's a good blog post on quick(er) sours: http://www.themadfermentationist.com/2010/07/sour-old-ale-quick-oud-bruin.html

turtle said:

considering the cost difference and time commitment involved, those jello cheesecakes are pretty freaking awesome. Sure I can make one from scratch when I have the time and the money..but sometimes swmbo just wants a piece of cheesecake. we're not exactly lambic connoisseurs, so I'm sure we'd be fine with faking it for a while.

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And as everybody has said, you can make sour beers quickly. You can make very tasty sour beers quickly. I have a fake kriek I made by souring a wheat beer and dumping it on cherries. It's really good. I'm working on an oud bruin that takes 6 months instead of 18. It's not that what you will make won't be enjoyable, you just have to be aware that what you make just by souring isn't going to resemble the properly aged version, especially in the case of lambic.

Check out the March/April 2011 issue of Zymurgy - it talks about "shortcuts" to making sour beers. I haven't tried this myself, but it might be something you might want to try if you want to get your sour beer pipeline started quickly while waiting for the "real deal" to mature.