Lactose in a Berliner Weisse

I may be going out on a limb but would adding a little lactose to a BW give the lactobaccilus more to eat and increase the sourness of the beer? What do you guys think?

It will work.

It should. Go for it and let us know the results.

depends, the WY & WL lacto strains are very intolerant of IBU's (stop working near 10IBU) and also very sensitive to alcohol, Id say give it a shot with a small portion of your berliner before you go adding lactose to the whole thing

dont wanna ruin a good batch of berliner by making it taste like lactose, if the lacto dont kick up much Id suggest adding a bit of lactic acid or citric acid to taste, I really like having a fresh squeezed lemon in my berliners anyway

I just bottled a batch of no-boil BW and the acidity came out perfectly. I pitched the lacto 72hrs before the sach. Took a little while for the sach to get going from the acidity but it got down to 1.002. I was just wondering if lactose would work for all the people wanting brisker sourness. i will give it a try next time I brew the recipe.

The question... How much lactose to use?

I've got a small-batch BW going right now - about 2.5 gallons, split between three 1-gal jugs. I'd be willing to experiment with one of the three and toss some lactose in, but frankly I have no idea how much I'd want to use.

At this point its all experimental. Id say a couple ounces per gallon would not be unreasonable. The other question would be how long would it take for the lacto to munch through all the lactose? I still have a llittle BW that I need to bottle I may add a little lacto at bottling to a few bottles and see if they come out more sour.

lactose should be converted 1:1 to lactic acid, so you need to figure out how acidic you want your BW, also you need to remember that lactic bacteria will stop working at less than 1%v/v lactic acid (very very sour) in addition to the alcohol and IBU's working against them

Id say, add maybe a 0.25oz or less in a gallon and see how it goes, if it gets too sour you can blend, if not sour enough, either add more Lactose to the gallon, or add more beer + lactose

This is an interesting read http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/20/1/93.pdf
Depending on what subspecies of L. Delbrueckii the Wyeast strain is it may not even be able to ferment lactose. I guess an experiment is in order unless we can figure out which of the three subspecies we have.

Since this comes up fairly high in search results, I asked white labs, and...

I'm wondering two things about your strain of delbrueckii, is it Lac minus or plus?
Meaning are they able to ferment lactose?
also, is the bacteria heterofermentative?

Hello Aaron,

It does ferment lactose and it is heterofermentative.
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