Exciting Accidental Introduction to Wild Brewing!!!

So my buddy and I made a Trippel a few weeks ago with the intent of making Revvy's BW afterwards. We ran out of time. So we had all this 2 row and pale malt grain left over with intentions of making a second running of that and the BW grain bill for a monster brew.

We put the grain in a trash bag and threw it in a fridge for two days to resume our plans.

Barleywine brewing day went very long, so I just threw the grains in my LT, poured a ton of ~170 water on it, and drove home with it in the trunk. 4-5 hours later as it sat in the garage, I opened the valve and let it drain in a bucket we'd been using all day, just rinsed, never sanitized. I forgot about it draining, so an hour or better later I went back to the garage, threw a lid on it and brought it to the swamp-tub.

Never had an airlock on the thing. A few days go by and I'm thinking, I should taste it to see at least if the wort is halfway decent and worth me boiling. SO SOUR. Holy cow, that's sour. Can barely swallow. I said the heck with it, maybe I'll just throw and airlock on it and get the courage to boil it up with some hops or something. Gravity was only 1.014...

I put the bucket in our closet (my SWMBO is awesome - pregnant and never even complained about the smelly beer), and I noticed the water levels were off in the airlock. I open the bucket and it sounds like a soda just fizzing away!!!

No boil, no yeast pitched, just old grains rinsed out and primaried!!! Awesome.

So today (~ 3 weeks later), I go to the LHBS and buy 6 pounds of Muntons DME to raise the gravity and make this an actual beer. I boiled it up in about a gallon and a half with a half ounce of cascades from the BW and a half of something else for about half an hour... cooled in the keg and checked again on the zombie beer. Very nice pellicle! So I filled the keg up with the now sour beer (finished the primary at 1.004!) and I'm going to let that sit in the keg for a year. OG of this blend ended up being 1.062, so I'm hoping since I pulled the beer from the bottom and swirled the racking cane about that I'll get a ton of sour yeast (lacto from the grains?) to go to town on my DME addition over the next year.


I know that there is little science and little to no chance of replication here for me, but I figured since I'd otherwise probably never try lambics and this one fell into my lap, that I'd give it a go and just see what happens. If it doesn't ferment well, I'll throw some US 05 into it with a pound of cherries when I come back to the states next year. I'm not going to even get close to tapping this guy for three years. I think this is going to be either fun, or maybe a horrible experiment gone wrong and I'll never want to make another lambic...

This is a lambic, right?

I love brewing...:rockin:

~Wm

I don't even like sours or lambics and this sounds interesting

Have fun with the experiment!

Not to burst your bubble but it's more likely that you have lactobacillus making lactic acid and not necessarily any yeast producing alcohol.

No, spontaneous fermentation (or souring) doesn't make it a lambic.

You might have made malt vinegar, who knows?

Ok. Well, we shall see how it ages I guess. It is currently fermenting in the corny. So even though the density decreased per the hydrometer and potential alcohol says from 1.012 OG to 1.2% alcohol content, it's unlikely that I'll get beer? Hmm. CAN this actually produce something worthwhile??? Vinegar, really?

If it doesn't taste like vinegar, it's not vinegar. It might be beer, it might not. It might be drinkable, it might not. Grain has all sorts of active stuff living on it, that's why you boil the wort. At this point, you might as well stick it out and see what happens. Cross your fingers and hope for the best! It might turn out surprisingly good after aging, although I'd be surprised if it was drinkable, and I don't have enough fermenters to commit one to something I didn't think would work.

Remember, it's only going to get more sour as time goes by, so if it's too sour to swallow now...

I see. Well, I'm shipping out to Italy for three years and will be leaving the keg with an open hose hooked up to the CO2 side in a bucket of water while I'm gone. I needed another keg anyway, so it worked out.

About the sourness, I drank a sample (maybe 3.5 gallons original wort plus 1.5 gallons f boiled and hopped DME wort) of the stuff kegged. It's really good now, but of course there were a lot of unfermented sugars balancing out the sourness. I should have tossed a ton of sugar plus non-fermentables for sweetness I guess. I was hoping since I cut the original stuff in half, I'd lighten the souring? Also know that I have little (maybe three bottles) of sour beer experience. Ever. So it could be a palate thing for now. I'm willing to try anything five or six...dozen times...

Thanks for the advice and opinions. I hope the cherries will make this palatable in a few years.

Why do you have a hose connected? It's got a pressure release valve, doesn't it? That water will either dry out or be toxic in three years, definitely not a good idea. Maybe I misunderstood, but I'm confused.

(BTW, I just got back from four years in Germany. Make sure you see as much of Europe as possible while you're over there.)

CaptainCoconut said:

Why do you have a hose connected? It's got a pressure release valve, doesn't it? That water will either dry out or be toxic in three years, definitely not a good idea. Maybe I misunderstood, but I'm confused.

Click to expand...

It won't be toxic, but I doubt it will ferment with alcohol or taste like anything somebody would want to drink. Since he'll be gone for three years, he's not going to lose out on anything by trying.

ReverseApacheMaster said:

It won't be toxic, but I doubt it will ferment with alcohol or taste like anything somebody would want to drink. Since he'll be gone for three years, he's not going to lose out on anything by trying.

Click to expand...

The water, not the wort. The water could definitely be toxic. For that matter, I'm not sure if acidity alone is enough to keep the wort from becoming toxic as well.

Yeah, I understood you meant the water. It would indeed become stagnant, but probably only after a month!

So it is definitely beer as far as I can tell. I hooked up the pressure vent line to the CO2 side today and immediately had to deal with where I was going to be aiming the unexpected eruption!!! Since I'm unpracticed in such a necessary skill... Made a scene in the post office parking lot. Imagine a guy with a keg, a 4' hose, and 20' stream of old-beer smelling liquid being fired across the parking lot at noon...

Memorable quotes: "I've worked in the food/restaurant industry for a LONG time and never seen anything like that!!!"

8 hours later, similar pressures were present, but I let less liquid go. It was terribly full the first time around, but with such a show at the PO, I built myself a little more headspace I think. At least I'm fairly certain now that there is NO oxygen in that tank. I'll continue to periodically purge the keg until I leave in 5 days, at which point I hope to just leave it sealed, or explain how to purge once a week to the grandparents.

I say I'm pretty sure it's beer because of the obvious (and copious) byproduct CO2. Perhaps I'm wrong here, but with the pressure and rapidity of fermentation, I'm just guessing that this will have a kick sometime in the far future.


That said, anyone know how to reduce sourness? If it is unpalatable, can I pasteurize the beer and put sugar in it in a few years? I'll have to seriously sample sour beers between now and my couple of returns (1, 2, and 3 years)...

William

If you're going to go ahead with it (and it sounds like you are- props!) you might consider adding a smack pack of one or another brett strains. Brett L or Brett B are standard liquid cultures at most LHBS. Don't add anything if it smells like garbage, because it won't magically make it better, but if it's cleanly sour smelling/tasting, adding brett will bring you closer to a lambic flavor and can help clean up potentially gross fermentation products from sour bacteria further down the line (diacytal, various bad-smelling acids, and so on).

CaptainCoconut said:

The water, not the wort. The water could definitely be toxic. For that matter, I'm not sure if acidity alone is enough to keep the wort from becoming toxic as well.

Click to expand...

You're not drinking the water, and beer doesn't go "toxic". It's got sugar, it's got hops. It's beer. Nothing bad grows in it. Bad tasting, sure. Make you sick? No.

Sugar and hops doesn't make it beer, it needs active yeast.
It's true that no pathogens can survive in wort after fermentation actually sets in (that's assuming it does). Before that, it's possible to get bacteria in there that could make toxic byproducts which won't go away with alcohol, acid, or heat. That's why if food sits out for a while without refrigeration, it's sometimes not safe to eat even after reheating to pasteurizing temperatures. All this is academic, though. It's probably not the case here, but it's wrong to say that it cannot happen, especially when no yeast has been added.
Similarly, if the water got nasties growing in it, their byproducts could make it into the beer, regardless of if the bacteria did or not. (Again, hypothetical)

You'll get a good idea of if it's worth keeping by seeing how it tastes. I'd also look into the effects of leaving a reasonably strong acidic solution in stainless steel for the length of time you're talking about. That might be good enough reason to dump it, or at least move it to glass.

CaptainCoconut said:

Sugar and hops doesn't make it beer, it needs active yeast.
It's true that no pathogens can survive in wort after fermentation actually sets in (that's assuming it does). Before that, it's possible to get bacteria in there that could make toxic byproducts which won't go away with alcohol, acid, or heat.

Click to expand...

Lactic acid bacteria are good competitors. They quickly produce acid, which lowers the pH, which makes it harder for most other bacteria to compete. Wild lactic acid bacteria can be heterofermentive, producing ethanol along with various other products in addition to lactic acid. When you hear someone talking about "ropiness" in a beer, it's a polysaccharide slime secreted by heterofermentive lactic acid bacteria. In order to actually harm you through some sort of wort infection, your beer would have to pick up a toxin-forming organism like Botulism. Fortunately, Botulism growth is inhibited by low pH (and high sugar concentrations), and without growth there's no sporulation and no toxin formation.

All that is academic, though, since grain and the air both carry yeast as well. It's good that they do, or the ambient ferments of Belgium would never make the beer we know as Lambic, since they don't add yeast to it.

So it is indeed possible that I have a batch of lactic acid juice and ethanol that produces CO2, but there may not be a specifi. Yeast strain involved?


I never thought my basic laziness could catalyze such an interesting discussion on microbiology and chemistry!!!

Regarding the low pH of beer and it's long term reaction to stainless steel, thank you very much for bringing that bit to my attention. I should have remembered this, but did not. I researched as suggested, and preliminary findings are; I highly recommend this article: http://corrosion-doctors.org/Food-Industry/Beer-corrosion.htm

I have no knowledge of how it will truly translate to my experiment, but some food for thought;
1: Soda kegs historically contain soda... pH is typically ~ 3. Coke can dissolve a nail and free seized engines. Used to do it on the farm.
2: My keg had who knows what soda in it and for who knows how long. It came from the Coca Cola company out of Wichita. The pH of my beer probably will not decrease to below 4.0
3: I brewed the beer with municipal water, but sanitized the keg with iodophor and my well water which most certainly has no chlorine content. So if any chlorine ions produce crevice corrosion, it should be minimal due to the temperature of water introduced to the grain for sparging and the boiling point of chlorine gas
4: Finally, due to the sour nature of this beer, I doubt I'm going to taste anything other than lactic acid
and malt. Maybe cherries.

I have no carboy here in MS where I'm visiting/storing this unwashed badger anus tea. So I am stuck with stainless. I truly appreciate the great discussion and interest resulting from me screwing up. This is a lot of fun and loads more exciting than I thought it would be.

Thanks again, and I'll keep sampling until Friday, then annual updates only!!!!!

dwarven_stout said:

Lactic acid bacteria are good competitors. They quickly produce acid, which lowers the pH, which makes it harder for most other bacteria to compete. Wild lactic acid bacteria can be heterofermentive, producing ethanol along with various other products in addition to lactic acid. When you hear someone talking about "ropiness" in a beer, it's a polysaccharide slime secreted by heterofermentive lactic acid bacteria. In order to actually harm you through some sort of wort infection, your beer would have to pick up a toxin-forming organism like Botulism. Fortunately, Botulism growth is inhibited by low pH (and high sugar concentrations), and without growth there's no sporulation and no toxin formation.

All that is academic, though, since grain and the air both carry yeast as well. It's good that they do, or the ambient ferments of Belgium would never make the beer we know as Lambic, since they don't add yeast to it.

Click to expand...

First, the lambic breweries are FULL of yeast, and he's not in a centuries-old lambic brewery.
Second, there are plenty of bacteria in the air besides wild yeast and lactic acid producing bacteria. These get chased out later, but their byproducts don't. Substitute "when vigorous lactic acid production sets in" for "after fermentation actually sets in" in my previous post, and it doesn't change a thing. In all cases of fermentation, there need to be measures in place to make sure the yeast and/or lactic acid bacteria get hold quicker than these other bacteria, such as salt or the addition of larger amounts of yeast or lactic acid bacteria. In this case, no hops were even added for their preservation qualities.
While no pathogens can survive in beer, it seems like many are under the impression that beer is a magical thing that cannot possibly go wrong and hurt you. I'm not saying that the OP's batch is necessarily bad, but it is irresponsible to tell him that it's impossible for anything dangerous to grow in room temperature sweet wort.
I'd be glad to continue the conversation somewhere else, but maybe this isn't the place.
Well, I'm late for work!

winterparkmg said:

Regarding the low pH of beer and it's long term reaction to stainless steel, thank you very much for bringing that bit to my attention. I should have remembered this, but did not. I researched as suggested, and preliminary findings are; I highly recommend this article: http://corrosion-doctors.org/Food-Industry/Beer-corrosion.htm

I have no knowledge of how it will truly translate to my experiment, but some food for thought;
1: Soda kegs historically contain soda... pH is typically ~ 3. Coke can dissolve a nail and free seized engines. Used to do it on the farm.
2: My keg had who knows what soda in it and for who knows how long. It came from the Coca Cola company out of Wichita. The pH of my beer probably will not decrease to below 4.0
3: I brewed the beer with municipal water, but sanitized the keg with iodophor and my well water which most certainly has no chlorine content. So if any chlorine ions produce crevice corrosion, it should be minimal due to the temperature of water introduced to the grain for sparging and the boiling point of chlorine gas
4: Finally, due to the sour nature of this beer, I doubt I'm going to taste anything other than lactic acid
and malt. Maybe cherries.

Click to expand...

Good article.
You're definitely good on chlorine, but I'd disagree that your beer won't get below 4, I'd say it's way below that already. The chart in that article shows that the pH of non-soured wheat beer is 3.3 - 3.7 and lactic acid is 2.2. Not that this would cause a problem, but I don't know.

Interesting point. I didn't think to consider the lactic acid. Again, first time with sour beer. I'm glad you're taking such an interest in keeping me on a semi-straight path. I also appreciate the thoughts on byproduct being harmful. Good thing it's kegged. I'll be able to drink an ounce or less and wait a few days, then more until I can determine there is little or no danger. Otherwise, I'm gonna have to feed it to a stray and see what happens... But seriously, any thoughts on how to clear the beer fit for consumption?

Still fermenting. Pressure problems are less since I sprayed about 1.5 gallons of foam out it seems. I'm stupid. I had no idea there was so much liquid dispensed. Oh well. More room for cherries I guess. I really hope it's drinkable after all this. Or that I like it.

You mentioned earlier the continued souring during aging. Is there a way to quantify this?is this due to lacto consuming fermentables, or anything that's in the keg but alcohol? Just wondering about how sour it might get, therefore how to balance it out recipe wise...
Thanks!
William

I wouldn't be too worried about toxins. If the wort had vigorous activity within a short time, it would have chased out any toxin-producing bacteria, so you're probably fine there. Like I said, it's just academic and probably not the case with your situation, but people should be aware of the possibility and not just assume that "nothing can go wrong." If you had boiled it, added hops, and added viable yeast, there would be no chance of something like that harming your beer, even if you left it in a wide-open bucket. In your case, you're probably still fine, and even if it did happen, the effects would be like food poisoning, not fatal.

Bacteria will keep consuming stuff that yeast can't. Generally, when yeast takes hold, it suppresses everything else, and the lacto doesn't really start up in earnest until fermentation slows down. That's why I wouldn't be too quick to assume that what you have is alcoholic. I'm pretty sure that lactic and acetic acid production also drops the gravity.

With the crazy amount of acid production you've had, I'd assume:
1. There wasn't much if any healthy yeast in there.
2. There may not be much left for the yeast to eat even if it did catch up somehow.

Then again, I'm no expert. I'd find someone with deeper knowledge of beer chemistry and get a second opinion. Or just let it go and see what happens. Even if it turns out tasting like the devil's vomit, it still makes an interesting experiment, and it definitely spurred some discussion and made us consider things we might not have otherwise.