Making it taste Lambic without being wild

[jessup]

heated to 120 and put in with the DME wort. ....whatever was giving the sourmash such a nice taste and smell.

i thought you heated to 140*? regardless, something sounds off if your sour mash truly smelled good to you. mine has always been pretty god awful. hmmmmm.

please do not take offense to this, but i think it's time you bought yourself a copy of wild brews and really educated yourself from the bottom up.

i know i too have asked this question and am curious if brett, lacto or pedio can eat lactose, but something tells me yes, they will. can anyone give any input?

 

[Babylon]

yep. it was 140. I misremembered.

 

[Babylon]

steady at 1.010 time to add the peaches. The sample tastes tangy, I really like the way the sourness has developed, nice and clean without an acetic bite, and an almost citric character that lingers. Still has a definite yeasty taste, almost like unbaked bread dough, some of that character might also be coming from the wheat malt. I got 10 lbs of peaches (that's 2 lbs per gallon, so should be about the right amount) Pitted and chopped them up in a big pot. It's working it's way up to 170 right now, looks like a big pot of peach soup (they sure are juicy) and it smells divine. I hope a fair amount of that flavor gets transferred over into the beer.

 

[PtotheL]

About trying to keep the sour mash at around 100*F... why not use thermos ? Sure, it won't be large enough for people wanting to sour half of their wort, but for people trying to get around 10%, like for a Guinness clone, it could work, no ?

 

[Babylon]

About trying to keep the sour mash at around 100*F... why not use thermos ? Sure, it won't be large enough for people wanting to sour half of their wort, but for people trying to get around 10%, like for a Guinness clone, it could work, no ?

That's not a bad idea. I may do that in the future. From all indications I think this batch is going to turn out pretty well. The excess that I took out to make room for the peaches had way too much yeast in it, but what i was able to get free of yeast had a really nice sourness.

 

[ReverseApacheMaster]

I have a sour mash on day 2 right now. It is perhaps one of the foulest smelling things EVER. I am souring a small portion of the mash, so I used a half gallon growler for the mash. I've definitely found that temperature makes a huge difference on how sour it gets. The growler doesn't keep warm temperatures but I keep it in a warm area during the day and then set it in hot water at night to keep it warmed up.

 

[PtotheL]

I'm brewing 11 gallons of saison today and I'm going to try souring 1 gallon of wort.

I bought myself a 1 gallon thermos-like cooler. Yesterday, I tried it out with 133*F water and it dropped to 91*F overnight.

I've been thinking about a practical way to make it as steady as possible around 100*F without the need to open up the cooler.

I'm going the cooler within a cooler method... My 1 gallon cooler is going to be filled with wort and the handfull of grains. This cooler will be inside a larger cooler with 120*F or so water. This way, in the morning and evening, I could replace the larger cooler's water to reheat it and offer a better insulation to the first cooler.

 

[ReverseApacheMaster]

I'm going the cooler within a cooler method... My 1 gallon cooler is going to be filled with wort and the handfull of grains. This cooler will be inside a larger cooler with 120*F or so water. This way, in the morning and evening, I could replace the larger cooler's water to reheat it and offer a better insulation to the first cooler.

It's definitely harder to keep fluid that hot than it is to keep liquid a little below room temperature. Even at 91F you're still keeping it warm enough to do its thing. However, the added heat will definitely help speed up the souring process.

 

[PtotheL]

Here's the setup I used

After the first 12 hours, it was smelling pretty bad. The smell went straight through both coolers. But after, it gradually went away.



After 3 days at +/- 100*F, now was the time.

I was anticipating the worse... Baby puke smell with a thick layer of thriving hair-like spores, maybe also some facehugger eggs. I gathered my courage and opened the lid... nothing. Not looking gross at all, just a faint rotten corn aroma and a cloudy yellow liquid.

I got closer and took a longer smell at it... ok, up close it definitively smelled bad. But still, it wasn't as bad as the first day or as what I would have expected.

I strained it to remove the grains and boiled it for 20 minutes. Then I cooled it down to 74*F in order to incorporate it in my saison which has been fermenting since 3 days also.

When cooling, something milky and which seems heavier than the rest of the liquid came together...

Swirling the pot around to cool it down faster set it in suspension again.

Took a sip of it, and it tasted real fine. No off or unpleasing flavors of any kind.

I would describe it as tangy, a bit sour (I honestly thought it would be sourer than it was), and somewhat milky.

I decided to go for it. It did not taste bad at the moment, so I doubt it will ruin my saison.

I therefore poured it all in both my fermenters 50/50. The ammount I added is around 7% of the total volume in the fermenters.

I am just wondering if this quantity is significant enough so that I can actually taste it in the end product and if the sourness will come through at all.

I'll tell in a couple of weeks.

 

[Babylon]

Transferred mine off the peaches today. I lost about a gallon or maybe a tiny bit more in the peaches, Ended up with what looks like about 4 gallons of beer. It has a really lovely taste currently, still a hint of yeast, a nice sour tone, and a definite presence from the peaches.

 

[Babylon]

It has now developed a pellicle. A fairly thin one. I assume this is because it is in a carboy with a fair amount of headspace and was thus exposed to oxygen. I am going to do my best not to disturb it until it is ready for bottling. My concern is that if it has a pellicle it is still actively fermenting and will make bottle bombs.