Hey I know this thread is several months old by now, but I happen to have tried my hand at an Atalanta clone so here it is for anyone else who might be interested. It's not a straight up clone because rather than using plum I ended up using mango nectar, but it's still good and fairly similar, at least to my taste buds. Probably a bit fruitier and more round bodied.
Mash:
7.5 lb Belgian 2-row pale
2.5 lb white wheat
1 lb flaked wheat
Hops:
1.5 oz Saaz 3.6% AA, 45 minutes
Other stuff:
0.5 lb acid malt "mash cap" (dunno if this is a real term, but I'll explain what I did in a sec)
0.5 lb unmilled acid malt for Lacto inoculation
1 gal R.W. Knudsen mango nectar
Mash in with 3 gal aiming for 150*F, once conversion is complete add 0.5 lb milled acid malt and rest for 15 minutes. This will make sure your wort is acidic to select for lactobacillus over other bugs.
Sparge with 4 gal, somewhere in the 150s.
I lautered the wort straight into the fermenter, didn't bother cooling it at all. Now put your 0.5 lb unmilled acid malt in a bag and toss it in. This will acidify your wort a bit more because it's acid malt, but the malt will also carry with it lactobacillus which will finish souring your wort. I used CO2 to clear the headspace of oxygen and popped the airlock on. Then I used a huge hot water bath to keep the temp between 100*F and 120*F for three days. Test a sample with a pH strip (use the ones for the lower pH range) to see that you've dropped the pH to about 3.5. If you've got contamination, you'll know from the smell. Nice clean tasting sweet and sour wort is what you want. It's delicious.
Ok, now I boiled the wort for 45 minutes to kill the lacto, cooled and pitched Wyeast 3711 french saison yeast. This is a good point to make sure your volume is about 4 gal. Boil off or add sterile water to get it right. OG was 1.052 at this point with 4 gal. I added the gallon of juice when it had formed a nice kreusen but you can probably add it at pitching, I just pitch at a slightly high temp so I didn't want to vaporize anything good tasting in the juice. I let the fermentation do its own temp control, went from about 71*F down to 66*F by the time it was done. Forgot to write down the FG.
Yep that's it, the stuff came out great and fairly similar to Atalanta, bit more body and round fruitiness but nice and tart, definitely a nice acidic sharpness. I'd never soured anything before and I've never posted here, so hopefully this post isn't gonna get wrecked. It'll be interesting to see if anyone's got anything to say though!
Cheers!
