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I always find these stories interesting, in the fact that if one tried to reproduce them, say by dropping a few grains from a pack of S05 into a 5 gallon batch, there would be quite a long lag time before seeing activity. Yet sometimes even with sanitization procedures in place, the beer will...

I've heard of many people seeing almost no perceivable souring at all on the first batch. I'd make a starter, myself. Let it go a good 10-14 days to maximize your Pedio cell count, then brew your beer and pitch. Or pitch Sacc, feed the starter again, let it go for another week, and pitch it when...

It's true that Lacto/Pedio/Aceto are all involved, however, the Lactobacillus, at least in Cantillon's foudres (see citation below), doesn't appear to play a very significant role, and will only be active while the alcohol level is fairly low, ie the very beginning of the fermentation. Since...

Here's the thing on fast souring... It's heavily reliant on Lactobacillus, which plays a very minimal role in traditional sour beers, as it's not very tolerant of alcohol and hops. The issue with it is, that it tends to produce the berliner-weiss flavor profile in almost anything you use it in...

Not quite, but close enough. I saved the last 2ish ounces, and added it to 100mL (sorry for mixed units, lol) of sterile wort in a 250mL Erlenmeyer flask and incubated for a couple of weeks, so pretty much the same process. I then stepped it to 250mL and then 500mL on the stirplate. It looked...

If you use Roe, then order some straight Pediococcus and propagate it per the Wyeast advice (it's in the MTF wiki under Pediococcus), just be sure to lower the pH of your starter wort to 4.5 to inhibit Clostridium and enteric bug contamination. From what I understand, it seems that the pitch...

In my experience, you're not going to see a fast (3 month) turnaround with JP cultures. They seem to have a lot of enteric bacteria, which when put in an unfinished wort, will give off some rancid flavors until the yeasts have had time to work on it. Personally, I have a golden sour that I...

Update: The beer is done. Went through a wicked diacetyl phase, but cleared up with a rouse and a bump to 68F. Nice brown ale taste, with that odd note of peat, even though there's no peat malt. I've decided to blend it with a Special B red ale that's finishing up now, and hit the...

Almost done with primary now. Down to 1.022, and kicking off some very interesting, candy-like esters when I pulled the bung out. I'm really thinking about blending half of this with a low gravity belgian red I'm fermenting, and then hitting it with Brett and Pedio.

Thanks for the follow up. I mill in the garage, and pitch in the house. I've learned that you just can't go around berlinnering everything, hehe. I added the chips in primary because I want this beer done fast. I've always added these chips to the secondary at about 0.5 oz per gallon...

Here's the little jug in action. I'm sorry for the double post, but I don't think I can edit from my phone.

I had just bought a 2.5 gallon water dispensing jug for the fridge at the grocery store, when an idea hit me. The jug looks just like a jerry can when stood up on its end, and would make a great small batch primary fermenter. 2 gallon batches would give it around 3" of head space. I was...

My Conan is on generation 15 and it still gets 80+% as long as the OG isn't too high and I mash around 150F. As others have said, I find it to be a dry and vaguely fruity (peach/apricot/pinapple-ish) yeast when fermented at around 64-66F, which is perfect for a pale ale. I last used it in a...

I have a question on the wort boil down. I did a practice run on this tonight in preparation for a run at this beer in a few days. I boiled the wort down to thick syrup, but it didn't get to a mahogany color. More like dark amber-red, as in C120's hue. It had a flavor much like crystal malt...