Sour acceleration

[CaptainZingo]

I know that making a good sour beer takes time, but I need to produce a "good enough" sour in a few weeks and I'm trying some of the sour wort techniques I've found.

I have a dark strong already fermented out with belgian yeast, so my plan is to add some soured wort to it and blend to taste.

My first attempt was taking the runoff from the mash (a gallon), adding some pale malt and candi syrup, purging with co2 and keeping it at 110 degrees for a few days. The result was the worst vomit ever. Despite the aroma that could gag a goat from 20 yards, I mixed some with a dubbel and drank it. Not good.

Second, I tried some DME wort and a handful of malt, this time with the temp up around 125. The result is not that sour but does not taste or smell pleasant either.

I'm thinking the bugs I'm getting from my malt or environment just aren't what I want, so I'm wondering if I can use a white labs sour mix in to sterile wort, but keep the temp high to accelerate the growth of pedio and lacto. Since I've already got the primary batch fermented out with ale yeast, I don't need to worry about killing the sacc with the high temps.

Thoughts?

Thanks

 

[emjay]

If you're going to go that route, you are much better off just buying the pure lacto and pedio strains.

What kind of sourness are you looking for anyways? Buying straight 88% food-grade lactic acid and mixing it in to taste is a pretty common way of quickly souring a beer.

 

[CaptainZingo]

I'm kind of a sour noob, but a Rodenbach type level of sourness is what I'm hoping for.

Based on my two sour wort experiments, I don't have a lot of confidence in a good result with a sour mash. I think the bugs I'm getting are not desirable strains, so my thought is to get the isolated cultures to start with, and I'm wondering if keeping them at high temps will accelerate their growth enough to produce something usable, or if this could still encourage undesirable bugs.

 

[JLem]

If all you are looking for is "good enough", how about adding some straight lactic acid or steeping/mashing some acidulated malt? This would avoid the bugs altogether and would give you immediate results.

 

[emjay]

Yes, it could still encourage desirable bugs. The thing is, wort is never really sterilized, it's just that the bad bugs are kept to a manageable level by boiling.

Rodenbach gets much of its sourness from acetic acid - the same stuff as white vinegar - but I've never heard of anyone souring their beer by adding it.

Honestly, I'm not sure of a quick way to do this. Rodenbach is a fairly complex sourness and even needs the right levels of oxygen to do it properly. It also uses small levels of wild yeasts, I believe.

Now, I use White Labs for just about everything, but maybe you'll want to try Wyeast on this one. The "Roselare Blend" they sell is actually the Rodenbach culture, and the ratios of bugs are intended to emulate its "sour profile". So maybe the best way to do this would be to warm up the Wyeast pack *without opening it* and keeping it there for a few hours to kill most of the sacc (120° might work, though I'd have to double check). That way, you're really only exposing the pure cultures to those kind of temperatures. Then you can try fermenting, maybe at 80° or so. I'd recommend sprinkling just a VERY tiny bit of dry yeast into the fermentor as well.

I can't guarantee this will work, but it's the only thing I can think of. And you'd need to be *extremely* sanitary with this one.

 

[WilliamWS]

For a successful sour started/mixer make it around 1.030 (dme, honey, whatever-doesn't really matter). Boil to sanitize, let it cool to 100 deg, pitch a bit of grain, and hold at 90-100 (if it gets a bit cooler no big deal just not ideal but you don't want it much hotter than 100. 125 is too hot). I've done this several times and have never gotten bad bugs (vomit, etc. smell), only good ones (fresh, tart, appley smell).

Oh, and I'd agree that your not going to get something like a rodenbach with shortcuts but you can make some nice sours nonetheless relatively quickly.

 

[CaptainZingo]

sorry, deleted slow reply.

William, I did essentially what you describe, but I think where I went wrong was not boiling to sanitize first. My first attempt was unboiled wort from the mash, and my second was just dme. Also my temps were higher because I read somewhere you wanted to be in the range where lacto could still survive but some other bugs couldn't. Maybe I'll give it one more shot.

emjay, yeah I thought about the wyeast blend but my LHBS doesn't have it and I wanted to start today.

Cheers

 

[WilliamWS]

Lacto can survive in the temps you used but does not thrive. It does best in the 90-100 range. If I recall, if you want to kill off other bugs you'd have to get things up closer to 160 but not over as that would kill the lacto, too. This is the traditional Berlinerweisse method.
The idea with making a starter via the method I mentioned is that at around 100 degrees with lacto and pedio taking hold very quickly the ph drop in the wort will keep nasties from growing. Like I said, it's worked for me.

 

[ReverseApacheMaster]

I have added white vinegar to sour beer. It doesn't really add an interesting flavor, even when you have brett funk with it. You might want to do a combination of vinegar and lactic acid.

I'm curious, did you boil the sour mash before you tasted it? Was it fermented before you tasted it? I've never had vomit smells in a sour mash and I haven't tasted one pre-boil but I do know it's not really a delicious smell pre-boil. After boil and fermentation, the off smells (and probably flavors) are driven off and you are left with a clean sourness.

 

[CaptainZingo]

Yeah I boiled the sour wort the first time because I did read boiling drives off those aromas, but it smelled so bad even after an hour I couldn't get near it.