I’m going to make some lacto fermented soda for the holidays as I’ve got a bunch of non-gluten, non-alcohol loving friends. I know some strains produce some alcohol and co2 along with lactic acid but I can’t quite figure out which is which.
Originally I was going to use one of the strains that produce co2 but it seems to come along with alcohol, which makes sense given the process that produces the co2. So now I’m going to force carb after getting the tartness I want. Might even pasteurize first.
anybody got favorite non-alcohol producing strains of lacto that they’ve worked with?
I use wyeast 5335 L Buchneri. I dont make what you are planning. I have asked wyeast and they assure me it is not an alcohol producer. I have not noticed off gassing.
Lactobacillus does not produce alcohol or ferment. If you’re seeing fermentation, then some sort of contamination occurred either in the original sample or during the brewing process.
Unfortunately, whitelabs lacto strains have a reputation (especially with milk the funk members) of having sacc contamination and aren’t a good reliable way of getting a pure source unless you want to re-plate them.
The ones that jump out relative to sour beer brewing are L. brevis and L. plantarium (I’m not sure whether any yeast labs use this one, but it’s commonly used in probiotic supplements and can be used to sour wort).
There are many strains of lactobacillus which absolutely can produce ethanol on their own. They are called heterofermentative strains (as opposed to homofermentative strains, which only produce lactic acid). Production of alcohol and CO2 by a lacto species is not a sign of contamination unless you are 100% sure that it is a homofermentative strain.
My background is chemical engineering, not microbiology, but production of CO2 from sugar by fermentation requires production of ethanol. Perhaps there are other pathways to produce CO2.
You want any of the homofermentive strains like delbruckii or acidophilus but you need to make sure you get a pure source otherwise any yeast showing up will produce ethanol. Acidophilus is more hardy than delbruckii and you can easily find it in probiotic pills but you want to use a reputable provider to minimize the risk of yeast-infected pills.
Omega yeast lacto blend is plantarum and brevis. I dont know about ethanol but it will sour and produce lactic acid at room temp with no problem. That is how they promote it and that is what my experience was. My n=1.
Sure if you consider < 0.3 abv sufficient to claim it produces ethanol… Lacto does not, and cannot attenuate wort to any meaningful degree, controlled conditions have shown that ethanol production from lacto is less than 0.3 abv at the very most. Anything beyond that is certainly due to contamination from yeast.
Like yeast, Lactobaccillus is facultative anaerobe, which means that it will metabolize carbon in the presence and absence of O2. Anaerobic metabolism is fermentation.