I know almost nothing about brewing sour beers.
I have been enjoying some of the more ‘mild’ commercial offerings that have been released here recently. The ones I enjoy most are more tart than sour. I am curious if I could brew something similar with forgoing a sour mash. A pseudo gose if you will…
How far below 5.2 can I effectively go with my mash pH before seeing adverse effects? Can I add lactic acid post fermentation? I get that this may just be a horrible idea :o
Lactic acid additions can be made pre-boil, post-boil or post-fermentation. The problem that the distilled lactic acid in that volume tends to have a bland or chemical flavor that I find unpleasant although if your target is low 4 to upper 3 on the ph scale it might not be enough to notice the flavor.
Best alternative would be to kettle sour using a good lactobacillus source.
Thanks. I will have to do some research on kettle souring…
I agree that the addition of actual lactic acid to a finished beer can give a lackluster tartness that just isn’t the same as actual Lactobacillus will do to the beer. But… perhaps that is what you like?! You won’t know if you don’t try it I suppose. Why not take a pint of your favorite pilsner or helles, and add a couple drops of acid to it and see how you like the taste?! Maybe it works for you.
FWIW, I find 95% of commercial gose beers to be WAY oversalted. Go easy on the salt, unless you like drinking seawater. Apparently tens of thousands of people do enjoy them, so, what do I know. >:(
O agree with the kettle souring. A lot of people use probiotics as their lacto source. Around here, brewers use Nancy’s Yogurt, which has a huge live lactobacillus population.
Anyone have a good link describing the process?
It sounds more involved than I likely have time for. I should probably just wait to attempt this and brew a wheat beer with some salt, limited lactic acid, and lime juice added post fermentation. I thought I saw that I should probably shoot for 250 ppm Cl in the finished beer. Is that reasonable?
Are you on Facebook? If so, join the Milk the Funk group.
I have been enjoying Avery’s El Gose of late which seems to be the sweet spot for me on salinity. They add lime to it as well which I enjoy.
This^^^^^
You could always try out a healthy dose of acidulated malt in your mash to get you part of the way there. Maybe a combo of that AND lactic acid might be better than just lactic acid alone (which I feel almost has a buttery, diacetyl-like note to it). I have used upwards of 2 pounds of acid malt in a 5 gallon batch for a notable tartness.
This gose without saying…
try adding some acidualted malt
How does that work? A cup of yogurt into the mash? boil? fermenting vessel?
we did our first kettle sour Gose this year. Turned out great (for the kids who like that crap, not me. Yuck). We cooled the kettle down to 80 and pitched a Lacto culture from Wyeast. Let it sit 3 days until the pH hit 3.2. Was amazed at how fast the pH dropped.
Granted, this was on a 15 bbl batch so not sure how much faster or slower a 10 gallon batch would be. It would certainly be depending on how healthy your culture is and how warm you keep the lacto.
Goes in post boil. Then you keep the wort warm for a few days. At Oakshire, they do it last thing on Fri. since they don’t work on weekends. They leave the kettle and whirlpool full of warm wort. Put in the yogurt, seal them with plastic wrap and close the lids. By the time they come back on Mon. morning it’s going great.
I should send ya some yogurt to try…
Interesting. Does this result in a finished beer that still has a live culture?
Good question…my guess would be yes, but it’s only a guess.
I’ll have to add gose (wort soured type) to my daily doses of yogurt and kim chi!
The culture will be alive in the beer if they do not boil after the the lactic acid bacteria fermentation (most breweries do boil after the wort is soured but before pitching yeast; this is called “kettle souring”). Viability in beer that is not pasteurized drops off pretty quickly with Lactobacillus, depending on the species/strain. Lab cultures and most likely probiotics usually don’t survive well in beer over long periods of time. This is why juice/liquid probiotics have a short shelf life. Wild strains that commercial brewers re-use over and over are usually much more resilient under the stressful conditions of beer (which is why using commercial beer dregs can produce great results).