Making it taste Lambic without being wild

[Babylon]

So Lindemans Peche is one of my favorite beers. I want to try to make something with similar characteristics but I don't want to do a wild fermentation. I'd also rather not take forever to brew it. I figure using fairly light malts, old hops, and doing a secondary fermentation on the peaches is part of it, but how do I get a sour taste? It looks like that comes from the lactobacillus? Any particular strains of domestic yeast that will give similar characteristics to a lindemans lambic? Also should it be fermented warmer or colder?

 

[ChshreCat]

You could do a sour mash. Mash a bit of 2-row. Drain off the wort and throw in a handful of raw grain. Let that sit in a warm place overnight and let the lacto do it's thing. Then brew your beer and add that sour wort to your new wort. The boil will kill the lacto, but leave the sour behind. Same flavor without worrying about having lacto in your fermenter and siphon and whatnot.

 

[Babylon]

You could do a sour mash. Mash a bit of 2-row. Drain off the wort and throw in a handful of raw grain. Let that sit in a warm place overnight and let the lacto do it's thing. Then brew your beer and add that sour wort to your new wort. The boil will kill the lacto, but leave the sour behind. Same flavor without worrying about having lacto in your fermenter and siphon and whatnot.

This looks good. Is raw grain something I'm going to be able to get from non bulk brewing suppliers?

 

[ChshreCat]

This looks good. Is raw grain something I'm going to be able to get from non bulk brewing suppliers?

by "raw grain" I just meant unmashed. Just save off some of the 2-row you get for the sour mash. The grain has lacto all over it.

 

[Babylon]

by "raw grain" I just meant unmashed. Just save off some of the 2-row you get for the sour mash. The grain has lacto all over it.

ok great. I thought you meant as in unmalted and unroasted.

 

[ryane]

brew up a sweetish wheat beer, use fruit or extract to get the flavor, and peaches by the way do not hold up to fermentation so youll either have to add extract or use apricots for the flavor, you can then add lactic acid to taste in the bottling bucket/keg for the sourness

 

[Oldsock]

I’ve been wanting to do a quick soured beer for awhile, but I wanted to avoid the problems/inconsistencies I've heard/read about sour mashes. Luckily someone forwarded me the method used by one of the larger sour beer brewers in America to do their "spontaneous" sour fruit beers.

I soured half the wort pre-boil using a starter built up from 1/2 cup of pale malt. To make the starter I combined the crushed malt with 1 pint of ~1.033 DME wort and held it at 120 (using a heating pad) for 3 days to encourage the lacto to grow. I then pitched the liquid from the starter into half the batch, flushed with CO2 (oxygen will encourage microbes you don't want), and left it at warm room temp for 3 days to sour. The other half was boiled with all the hops and pitched with ale yeast. Last night I boiled/chilled the sour half (nice tart lactic acid, no weird off-flavors) and racked it onto the clean half.

If you want something with more sourness you could sour the whole thing, boil it with a small amount of hops, and pitch a clean ale yeast in. Then just age on the fresh/ripe fruit of your choice.

 

[Bobby_M]

by "raw grain" I just meant unmashed. Just save off some of the 2-row you get for the sour mash. The grain has lacto all over it.

The only issue I keep hearing about is lacto isn't the only thing all over it. I guess one way around it is to get a pure lacto culture from white labs. Oldsock's method of souring half (or some portion) of the beer makes a lot of sense. I think letting the whole batch sour, in addition to the bitterness you'll get out of the peaches, might be over the top without back sweetening.

Making your own lactic acid with lacto cultures is more purist but just adding food grade lactic acid results in the same thing or at least in theory.

Speaking of purists, just be careful to not use the word Lambic when you later describe this beer ;-)

 

[ReverseApacheMaster]

Somebody around these parts did the partial sour mash thing with cherries. Search for "sour mash crick" and you'll find it. Apparently it turned out very well.

Without the secondary brett fermentation and the residual taste of oak I don't think it will taste "lambic" as much as it will like a sour mash beer, e.g. a berliner weisse. The feller that did the sour mash with cherries had that impression.

Also, as ryane points out, peaches don't hold up well. I've fermented with peaches in the secondary. It's not bad, but you don't get a lot of peach flavor. It mostly just adds a fruity mellowness.

 

[Oldsock]

Also, as ryane points out, peaches don't hold up well. I've fermented with peaches in the secondary. It's not bad, but you don't get a lot of peach flavor. It mostly just adds a fruity mellowness.

I've had good luck with peaches, the key seems to be using fresh/ripe peaches and a long exposure. I did ~2 lbs/gallon of pitted, skin-on, white peaches from a local farmers market. I let the beer sit on them for close to 6 months until they turned to goo, then I racked the beer off them for a couple months for the rest of the goo to settle out before bottling.

You could add some oak to a sour mashed beer (I'm planning on adding some cubes when I rack mine to secondary), but to be honestly I don't taste much oak in the sweet fruit lambics (lambics traditionally use well used wooden casks for aging their beer). You are spot on for the Brett, although again those sweet fruit ones have much less funk character and dryness than the more traditional fruit lambics from Cantillon, Drie Fonteinen etc...

 

[Stratotankard]

The only issue I keep hearing about is lacto isn't the only thing all over it.

Lacto isn't the only thing on the grain, but it is the fastest acting of the bunch. Since you're going to boil the wort afterwords, any of the bugs will be killed off. At least that's my understanding. I've had mixed results with sour mashes. My 24 hour sour mash was not very sour, but my 36 hour mash was mouth puckering, eye watering sour. Maybe the grain I used on the first was "cleaner"?

Terje

 

[Babylon]

The only issue I keep hearing about is lacto isn't the only thing all over it. I guess one way around it is to get a pure lacto culture from white labs. Oldsock's method of souring half (or some portion) of the beer makes a lot of sense. I think letting the whole batch sour, in addition to the bitterness you'll get out of the peaches, might be over the top without back sweetening.

Making your own lactic acid with lacto cultures is more purist but just adding food grade lactic acid results in the same thing or at least in theory.

Speaking of purists, just be careful to not use the word Lambic when you later describe this beer ;-)

Nope, I've been careful not to so far. It's a peach ale

 

[Oldsock]

I say Lambic just like I say Kolsch, English Pale Ale, Czech Pils, Munich Helles, and Irish Dry Stout...

 

[B-Dub]

I say Lambic just like I say Kolsch, English Pale Ale, Czech Pils, Munich Helles, and Irish Dry Stout...

Yep! Because that's what is tastes like the most and everyone knows what you are trying to accomplish.

BW

 

[Homebrewtastic]

and doing a secondary fermentation on the peaches is part of it

A little help with this part if I may. I just finished a peach saison using over 10.5 pounds of peaches from my peach tree. The sugars in peaches are HIGHLY ferment-able. My saison came out quite dry, but with reasonably subtle peach flavor. I put 3.5 lbs. of it pureed into the last 20 minutes of the boil. 2lbs. in the primary. And then 5 lbs. of cut up peaches during secondary.

So make sure you mash at a higher temperature than you normally would so that there's enough non-fermentables in there. Let me know how your beer turns out. I'm actually about to start a sour peach beer myself. I plan on sour mashing as well.

 

[B-Dub]

When my barrel hits 12 months this Dec I am going to rack 4 gallons on to 5 pounds of white peaches. The farmers markets are starting to get some really great fruit right now. The plan is to freeze and vacuum pack all the fruit until the lambic is ready.

BW

 

[Babylon]

So I started my sourmash, with a gallon of water and 2 lbs of two row. It's definitely doing something, but I don't think I kept it warm enough, it doesn't smell sour so much as like bread dough, I think there's some wild yeast in there. I haven't tasted it, and am considering doing so, but what might happen if I put the gallon of wort in with my other wort without boiling it? It smells tasty so it seems like a good idea to me, but I don't want to end up introducing something that will ruin the batch.

To elaborate slightly I mashed 2 lbs 2 row with a gallon of water, cooled the water down to 110* and tossed in a handful of 2 row, it's been sitting in my basement on top of the hot water heater for about 3 days, but the hot water heater doesn't really transmit much if any heat, so I think the temp has been in the mid 70's. It has plastic wrap on top which I have moved a couple of times to smell it, the first day it smelled slightly sour, now it smells kinda like sourdough bread and it had bubbles in it.

 

[scone]

The first and only time I've done a sour mash, I let the temperature get down to the 60's 70's, and the smell was atrocious. Boiling didn't help, and after I aged the beer for two months and it still tasted like vomit, I threw the batch out.

Not to scare you off, I hope you have better luck, but I'm not going to try again without careful temperature control. Lacto is pretty lazy at colder temperatures, and there are all sorts of things on that grain you put in there...

EDIT: the fact that yours smells like sourdough is definitely a good sign!

 

[Babylon]

So I heated up the gallon of sour mash to about 140, but not for long, pitched that in with the regylar wort and hops and a package of safale 05. I think the sour bugs worked overtime at first, because I didnt cool it quite enough and had a towel around it to block light, Fermentation was slow starting, I pitched another pack of S-05 and now it is happily bubbling away. I am expecting this to turnout pretty sour, but I think that will be a good thing.

 

[jessup]

The first and only time I've done a sour mash, I let the temperature get down to the 60's 70's, and the smell was atrocious. Boiling didn't help, and after I aged the beer for two months and it still tasted like vomit, I threw the batch out.

definitely don't let this statement scare you. i've done a few sour mashes, about 3, and everytime i heat the ~ 140* and pitch the grains and sit back for a few days while that sucker sours up w/ lacto. i wrap with a blanket or 2 and place near the baseboard heat and just let it slowly drop down to room temperature which typically take about 2 days. i've had great successes doing this so don't be shy and give it a try. an aquarium heater in a bucket of water would be best, though. a few days @ 70* may not be the best idea...

i hope you boiled the sour mash (you said you heated to 140*) prior to pitching the yeast. i wouldn't mess around with a non-pastuerized sour mash. you never know what's growing in that thing-

 

[Babylon]

I didn't boil it. I probably should have. However i am going for a lambic tasting beer and I figured some uncertain wild stuff might work out well. Going with a fairly experimental approach here. So far it still smells good.

 

[DKershner]

I didn't boil it. I probably should have. However i am going for a lambic tasting beer and I figured some uncertain wild stuff might work out well. Going with a fairly experimental approach here. So far it still smells good.

Wasn't the whole point not to do a wild fermentation? Maybe I missed something, but it seems like you forgot about your original purpose...

Don't get me wrong, I think your result will be interesting, but you went from not wanting to a a wild ferment to doing a completely uncontrolled wild ferment.

 

[Babylon]

Wasn't the whole point not to do a wild fermentation? Maybe I missed something, but it seems like you forgot about your original purpose...

Don't get me wrong, I think your result will be interesting, but you went from not wanting to a a wild ferment to doing a completely uncontrolled wild ferment.

well, the point was to avoid cultivating the wild bugs in my basement and local area. They are generally not ones I like. The ones on the handful of grain however seem to be much more amenable to being tasty.

 

[Homebrewtastic]

Wasn't the whole point not to do a wild fermentation? Maybe I missed something, but it seems like you forgot about your original purpose...

Don't get me wrong, I think your result will be interesting, but you went from not wanting to a a wild ferment to doing a completely uncontrolled wild ferment.

The point of the sour mash is that you can cultivate the lacto into your wort before you boil it.

My sour peach has been going for about 2 weeks now and is looking ready to bottle.

I didn't sour the whole mash, infact I only did a small amount. I took 1 gallon of water and brought it up to 130 with some molasses and sugar, then threw in a pound of belgian pils. Instead of screwing with a blanket I just threw it outside for a couple of days. It's been in the high 90's/low 100's the past few weeks. It got nice and sour.

The sample I just took from my carboy is actually pretty nice. Lightly sour, but very refreshing.

 

[bierhaus15]

I brew a Berliner Weisse of sorts that goes from grain to glass in less than a months time. Basically I take the leftover last runnings of whatever beer I recently brewed (usually a wheat) and put it back into the MLT with the spent grains. I let that sit overnight or longer, and drain it when it stinks enough for my liking. This liquid is usually sufficiently sour for a small 2.5/3.5 gallon batch of BW. I add this liquid to to my sparge water, heat it up, and progress with the batch as normal.

I am not saying this method is particularly efficient or better than the other methods suggested. It's pretty much a convoluted sour mash that I recirculate through my mash via a sparge. However, I do like it because the results have been very good (it has a soft sour profile) and it's easy to do.

 

[DKershner]

well, the point was to avoid cultivating the wild bugs in my basement and local area. They are generally not ones I like. The ones on the handful of grain however seem to be much more amenable to being tasty.

That makes some more sense...it just seemed like you went from 0-150 over the course of this post. Plus, it seemed like you were avoiding bugs to keep your fermenters and kegs clean.

 

[Babylon]

That makes some more sense...it just seemed like you went from 0-150 over the course of this post. Plus, it seemed like you were avoiding bugs to keep your fermenters and kegs clean.

I have no kegs, and I figure I can clean my fermenters to a level I wont be too worried about it. I hadn't realized when I started the thread that there were so many ways to get wild bugs. I also don't want to take years to make my beer which seems to be the normal course of things for a truly wild beer. I don't mind taking a few months, but letting it ferment for years is more than I want to do. I took a sample of this last night (I know it's not close to done, but I wanted to see how it was progressing and i have a bit too much beer in my fermenter anyways, there's no way I will be able to fit it all plus a bunch of peaches in the smaller secondary fermenter) the sourness is not very pronounced, fairly subtle and it is incredibly yeasty, I don't think I sampled either of my stouts this early before and I am really amazed by how much yeast taste it has at the moment. Other than that it is kinda bland, which is ok because I want the peach taste to be fairly prominent. It's also at a gravity of 1.015 at the moment, but still bubbling (I don't mean the airlock, I mean the beer) that plus the really yeasty taste means, to me, that it is still working away at a fairly good clip.

 

[Babylon]

Realized my biggest mistake at not boiling the sour mash. If the yeast eat all the sugars from the peaches I end up with a completely dry beer. To have it taste properly peachy I'll need some sweetness but lactobacillus eat lactose. My thought was that if alcohol inhibits lactobacillus I could add lactose after the peaches are all done and let it sit for a week or so to make sure nothing is eating it.

I don't think I have any pedio as the sourness is really really mild and there's not buttery taste whatsoever.

 

[Homebrewtastic]

Here's the thing. The peaches are pretty much 100% fermentable, at least in my experience they are. So regardless of any lacto being present, your sacc is going to be able to eat all of those sugars anyway.

My peach saison ended up with some very nice subtle peachyness despite how fermentable all of those sugars were.

What's your grain bill and at what temp did you mash? Depending on that, you still might have enough non-fermentables from the grain to keep your beer from being completely dry.

Also do you know that you have lacto or anything else that's wild? Any sort of pellicle forming?

 

[Babylon]

No pellicle. There was lacto originally because of the handful of grain, or at least some bug that soured my initial mash nicely. I am expecting all the sugars from the peaches to ferment out as well as almost all from the grains, What I was wondering was what effect sweetening with lactose was likely to have. I know yeast can't eat that and if the alcohol has killed off or strongly inhibited the lacto (or whatever souring bug I had, it smelled like sourdough and tasted nice and clean, definitely not acetic) then I thought it could work to sweeten, but if the lacto eat it all then obviously it wont. I had also heard lacto can kill itself off with high acids, which could be a good thing since I'd like some more sourness in there.

Grain bill was 1 lb of 2 row 3 pounds of pilsen DME and 3 pounds of wheat DME (actually a blend of wheat and barley) The 2 row I mashed at 170 and then allowed to sour with a handful of grain for the cultures for 3 days, then heated to 120 and put in with the DME wort. I figured this would not kill the lacto, or whatever was giving the sourmash such a nice taste and smell. I don't know if it did or not but there's not much sour to it at the moment.