Gose anyone?

[zoebisch01]

If you want Lacto, just leave the mash sit in the tun. You can mashout if you want. They seem to have survived the 160 °F I put them through for my Wit. Thing is, you just leave it covered overnight. I have found that once you hit around 130 °F be ready to move fast because your pH reduction is going to happen very quickly when you get to their zone. You'll have to play with it too to get it right, but in general 18 hours and you are looking at a pronounced sourness if you treat them right, temperature-wise. The inoculation idea works, but the problem is it takes much longer. Another approach I have used is, you separate about a lb of your grain put it in a sufficient SS pot, strike it to get around 130 °F and then set it covered in the oven with the light on which should provide you near ideal Lacto temps. Then you can just add that into your tun prior to sparge, but after conversion.

 

[landhoney]

I started working on mine. I have about a gallon of wort left from the last Weissbier and I kept 800ml of unhopped wort as well. The latter was boiled, cooled and inoculated with a tsp of crushed malt.
I’ll be boiling up the hopped wort with some coriander and salt and ferment it with an Alt yeast (any neutral low flocc German yeast should do). The soured wort will be boiled to kill the bacteria (I don’t want to work with live ones unless I have a dedicated bucket) and used to blend with the beer. I’ts a half-ass approach, but this is my first sour beer and I’m afraid if I jump in with a 5gal batch I may end up with 5 gal undrinkable beer.
I’m also trying to isolate a pure lacto culture from the malt. But this is more a geeky adventure.
Does lacto grow in hopped wort, would I have to find a strain that does?
Kai

Sounds like a good plan Kaiser, I'll be interested to see how your's turns out. Good luck isolating the lacto, what will be your approach/methods to do this? As I understand it, Lacto will grow in hopped wort - but is slowed down by the hops. In other words, the less hops - the less inhibited the lacto will be and the sourer the beer. That is my understanding anyway.

 

[Kaiser]

Good luck isolating the lacto, what will be your approach/methods to do this?

I'll be streaking it out on a plate of unhopped wort. Once I have colonies that don't look like yeast, I'll be picking one and propagating it in wort.

Kai

 

[zoebisch01]

Personally, I'd make sure that strain has a serious leg up especially if there is uncertainty about the retarding effect of the hops. Again, you will most certainly see the best results by maintaining proper temperature.

 

[Kaiser]

Here is a report on my first attempt:

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Because I generally don't like sour beers, I only made a 1 gal batch which turned out to be a good idea.
The wort was taken from a batch of wheat beer that was brewed with 70% light wheat malt and 30% Pilsner malt (at 12 Plato) and hopped to about 10 IBU. 0.8 l of the unhopped wort was boiled for 15 min and inoculated with about 1 Tsp crushed malt. This wort was then left to sour at ~ 21 c (70 f) for a few days before 0.5 l were added to 2.5 l of hopped wort and then boiled for 15 min. The boil served to kill all the bugs in the soured wort. 12 crushed coriander seeds and 1/2 tsp of kosher salt were added to the boil as well as 0.5l water to compensate evaporation.
After cooling the wort was fermented with WY1007 (German Ale) for a week at about 20C (68F) and bottled straight from the fermenter. 2g of table sugar was added to each bottle for carbonation.
After 2 weeks I tasted the result:
Appearance:

• good head retention
• cloudy as I remember a Gose from Germany

Aroma:

• there is some light sour aroma, but I think that there should be more

Taste:

• To much salt. The salt is way to prominent and it tastes like Gatorade
• Not sour enough. The sourness is rather restrained. I either want to increase the portion of soured wort or just invest into a lacto culture instead of souring with malt
• The coriander is there but barely noticeable. I won't change that for now
• The carbonation was a little low. Most likely it didn't ferment as far as I wanted it to ferment

All in all, a decent, yet not really drinkable first attempt. I'll stick with the small batches off Weissbier batches until I figured out how to get it just right.