Sour fix

[hopbrad]

I have a Golden Sour going, about a year. The yeast/bugs was from a harvested sour cake. The original pitch was on a flanders where I co-pitched dregs I stepped up a few times of Jolly pumpkin bam biere and some wlp500.
This round I have also dumped in dregs from a few russian river sours and another Jolly Pumpkin.

Ive sampled it a few times and it has a nice brett/funk character but it is lacking tartness and acidity. I added fruit about 2 months ago. 4 lbs of a blend of frozen Raspberries, blackberries and blueberries.
The best way to describe it is flat/muddled. It needs that acidic bite and tartness to pop.

side note - my flanders behaved the same way. nice brett/funk, not much acidity. Maybe old dregs and the lacto/pedio never grew.
and the water profile on this was soft, a touch of gypsum and Calcium Chloride but mostly acidulated malt for the mash.

my thoughts are to either:
1. let it ride for another few months, possibly add more frozen berrys
2. add some lactic acid
3. bottle and have another mediocre sour on hand.
4. other options?

Im really interested to see if option 2 would get me there and people's thoughts. I do love tongue puckering sours, but I'd be happy with that extra backend tartness which I think will help make the fruit pop too. wonder if adding a touch more brewing salts in conjunction would lower pH and help the fruit and beer pop. or if the mineral-iness alone will help things pop. or some oak chips soaked in red wine for more tannins?
I've read overdoing lactic can give it an artificial twang anyway, so I'd give it a small dose.

 

[Rob2010SS]

Have you checked pH on it? Do you know where that's at?

I've heard pitching dregs should help but it sounds as though you've done that a few times now.

I'm a lover of the wrenching sours myself so I'm curious what people recommend to you here. Although, if the original pitch was from jolly pumpkins bam biere, I wonder how sour that will get. That's not really sour to me....

 

[hopbrad]

Have you checked pH on it? Do you know where that's at?

I've heard pitching dregs should help but it sounds as though you've done that a few times now.

I'm a lover of the wrenching sours myself so I'm curious what people recommend to you here. Although, if the original pitch was from jolly pumpkins bam biere, I wonder how sour that will get. That's not really sour to me....

I havent taken a ph reading. I can't at the moment. bought a meter a while back, didnt know i needed a storage solution. so its been sitting in RO water. pretty sure its inaccurate so going off of the ol taste buds. I have a friend coming down in a month so will order him the calibration/buffer solution.

i agree bam biere isnt sour, but read alot of forums that their bugs are very expressive and can sour a beer super fast. maybe bam doesnt apply or i misread it as funky vs sour.

I've been researching alot on adding lactic acid after fermentation and it seems it works but can be very clean/one dimensional if used right. I'm thinking in my case it will work since my beer has every other aspect of funkiness, just not quite the acidity i'm going for. I will try a sample with my already bottle flanders and a dropper first.

 

[radwizard]

Can you check the gravity? If the gravity is already super low, then your bugs might not be having enough to eat.
Adding wort could be a solution for you.

 

[behindthetimes]

The lactic acid might work for you if it's just a subtle tartness you're after and the beer otherwise seems ready. The best part about that theory: you can test it. Just add a bit of lactic acid to a sample.

 

[RPh_Guy]

It sounds like your dregs didn't contain enough bacteria and/or you did not provide them with enough warmth for them to fully sour your wort..

More time will not likely help, especially after a year. Personally I've heard nothing but bad experiences from adding straight lactic acid, so I would never do this.

radwizard is on to something. I think the "best" solution here is to cold crash and rack off the yeast, add a small amount of fresh wort with a new pitch of only bacteria (not from dregs) and warm it up to a suitable temperature based on your species of bacteria for a few days so they can sour it. After that point you'd want to probably add back some yeast to ferment the newly added wort (at a normal fermentation temperature of course).

Your other option would be to blend with a younger beer that is more aggressively soured with bacteria (mainly because that's a good excuse to brew more!).

 

[madscientist451]

I agree with RPh Guy's last comment. Get an aggressive sour culture, brew another beer and when its done, perform some blending trials to get the flavor profile you are looking for.

 

[stz]

Yeah this is prime blending territory. Assertive, bold, bright and forward sour character doesn't really develop from long term ageing with brett unless it was already present. Long term ageing with the wrong beer in less than optimal conditions highlight flabby, oxidised malt forward flavour with occasional acetic character which can contain complexity, but it doesn't sound like what you want.

Long term ageing with brett is great for interesting flavours from yeast undergoing lysis, yeast fermentation bi products, biotransformation of hop and fruit character (especially cherry) via b-glucosidase enyzme which brett produces in relative abundance compared to saccharomyces. Oxygen exposure can produce acetic, but you don't want that unless you are really going to get serious about blending.

Lactics don't like the ethanol, hops and the temperature usually used for conditioning. I doubt there is much lactic activity in there. You can do what you've done, use fruit to increase the sourness. While everybody will give you stick for adding straight lactic acid to the beer that is pretty much what you are aiming to do with a clean kettle sour and while I'm against the practice as a rule, a few ml in a batch of beer is not going cause the world to end. Using it exclusively to sour a beer is dumb and I don't know why somebody would think that was ok. Tartaric acid, malic acid, citric acid can all come from fruit additions and contribute to a more complex sour.

Produce a simple kettle sour. Use what you want for a nice tart berliner weisse. Use some for blending with your older brett-fruit-sour combo. Use some to make a young sour fruit beer. Oh and while this may not be appropriate, hibiscus ramps up the sourness and is a good addition to fruit/red berry fruit flavours. Try a blend of red wine or even port.

If anybody is considering making a stock red ale for blending you might as well hop it quite aggressively and make it quite strong, at least 6.5% and above. You might want to get the pH down a little lower than usual as well if not kettle souring. This is especially vital if it is to go into wood. It is quite normal to have stock beer ageing, one lighter, one darker. When you produce a product, you blend proportions with fresh beer and/or fruit before conditioning and packaging. The stock beer needs to survive ageing so high abv, high hop rates and low pH are normal. Wood absorbs quite a lot of bitterness from beer, comparable to sterile filtration and it fades with time.

 

[hopbrad]

very good info here.
The gravity is 1.003
I should have added a lacto culture when I racked the beer onto the berries. I figured it was in there already from the dregs.
I'll bottle some with the lactic addition, some with hibiscus. and reserve a gallon or so for blending.
I do have another 4.5 gallons of it without berries sitting too.

any suggestions on a good lacto culture?

 

[RPh_Guy]

If you're going to add Lacto you need fresh sugar in there for it to eat (AND some way to prevent the yeast from eating it first). Just adding it to your 1.003 beer won't accomplish anything.

L. plantarum is in my opinion far superior to any other species for souring.
It sours down to a low pH rapidly at room temperature and is generally alcohol tolerant at levels found in beer.

L. plantarum can be obtained from certain probiotics, some commercial brewing cultures, or even certain yogurt brands.

I assumed your beer (and the previous one on the yeast cake) is unhopped, otherwise Lactobacilli won't be able to do anything at this point. Blending would be your only option.

The advantage to the first option I suggested (as opposed to normal blending) is that you won't have as much sugar for the Brett left to ferment, so it will be done faster... If you're impatient like me. I was thinking outside the box.
You could probably get away with adding 5-10% new wort with that method. Blending I suspect you would need at least 2-3 times that much, quite possibly much more. However blending does allow you to more accurately target a specific level of sourness. I'm not saying it's an inferior method.

 

[hopbrad]

figure I would update as its been about a month after I packaged(bottle condidtioned). I did go with the lactic acid addition and am very happy with the outcome. Just enough extra tartness to dry out the ol' taste buds and let the berries pop. I wouldn't hesitate adding some to a mixed culture fermentation that has good funkiness from the brett but needs the extra push on the sour/tartness level.
I cant remember the exact amount used. I want to say about 1/3 or so of the bottle.