Author: Marshall Schott

Following my barely successful attempt at wrangling wild yeast from my front yard, I knew there had to be a better way to get a funky/sour beer naturally, sans professionally cultured organisms. The few friends I have who’ve tried the sour mash technique spoke rather strongly against it, using words like “puke,” “baby diaper,” and “rotten cheese” to describe the flavors and aromas of the resultant beers. Despite the success stories I’d read online, I knew this wasn’t the route I wanted to go. I started looking around for ways to sour wort using the lactobacillus residing naturally on grain, as it seemed to me a potentially safer alternative would be to sour the wort (in a fermentor) rather than the mash. Sure enough, after some googlin’, I came across a few blog and forum posts by people who have done exactly this using myriad methods. I knew I was going to try it, I just wasn’t terribly excited about chancing an entire batch of beer. Halfway through a Helles brew day, I got the idea to try this out on a small portion of the leftover wort. Once both fermentors were full, I poured off about 2 quarts of wort from the kettle into a sanitized 1 gallon aluminum pitcher and tossed in a handful of uncrushed 2-row.

The wort was just above 90°F at this point, a temperature I’d read would encourage the lacto to do its thing. Immediately after tossing the grains in, I wondered if using acidulated malt may have been better, something I may try in the future. I covered the pitcher with a BIAB bag and left it sitting in my very warm garage.

By the next morning, the temperature was hovering right around 89° and there didn’t appear to be much going on.

Curious as I am, I came back to check on the beer a few hours later and what I found was the beginning of what looked like some form of fermentation.

It still smelled mostly of sweet wort at this point, nothing terribly funky. The temp had dropped to about 85°F, so I moved the covered pitcher into a warmer shaded area outside of my garage and left it for a couple hours, which brought the temp back up to about 96°F.

The kräusen definitely continued to develop in the warmer environment, covering nearly the entire surface of the liquid once I brought it back in a few hours later.

Approximately 40 hours after adding the grains to the wort, the beer seemed to develop more character, smelling sort of how I had hoped– subtle lactic funkiness. Since I was expecting something much more akin to baby barf, I was pleased and decided it was time to taste it. I approached this, again, with low expectations. While not blown away, I did think there was something sort of pleasurable about the flavor, mostly the sort of noticeable lactic tartness. Definitely not terrible.

This is the point I opted to move forward with stove-top pasteurization by pouring it through a strainer into a pot, which I held at about 150°F for about 10 minutes (my precision with this was about as good as my precision aiming at a kids’ urinal).

The warm, pasteurized beer was then transferred into a sanitized flask and chilled to 60°F via ice bath.

Once chilled, the flask was moved to the ferm chamber and a couple squirts of actively fermenting Helles (WLP029 yeast) were added.

Activity was visible within 24 hours.

The bubbles were interesting to me, much different than the thick milky looking krausen I usually see sitting atop my fermenting beer.

Ten days after the yeast was pitched, the beer was cold crashed then bottled in a single 22 oz bomber.

This bottle was left in a 70°F room to carbonate for 3 weeks before being moved to the refrigerator to settle out for another few weeks. To be honest, I was hesitant to open it, partly for fear it would explode in my face and partly because I thought it might taste like donkey gooch. The time finally came…

I took the single bottle to share with friends at the House of Pendragon tasting room. Unfortunately, I completely forgot to take a photo of the beer in the glass. For what it’s worth, it was very pale and hazy, could easily have been mistaken for a Weissbier.

| THE VERDICT |

Blegh! A slight funkiness that I suppose came from whatever wild yeasts were living on the grains; very little tartness, which is likely a result of the fact I didn’t leave it alone long enough for the pH to drop before pasteurizing; and a very (very) noticeable flavor of burnt rubber, possibly because I didn’t pitch enough WLP029 from the krausen of another fermenting beer. The most appealing aspect of this beer, if you want to call it that, was the level of carbonation, which I’m guessing was right around 2.8- a peppy sparkle that would have meshed beautifully with a delicious tart style. Of the 6 other samplers, not a single one described this beer as being pleasurable in any way. It wasn’t gag-inducing, just not at all tasty.

So I’m 0 for 2. At least they’ve all been tiny batches. I soon plan to pitch a huge starter of cultured lactobacillus brevis into pre-boiled low OG wort, let it sit around 110°F for 2-3 days or however long it takes to get super tart, then pasteurize by bringing it up to a brief boil and ferment it out with Notty at 62°F. I may be done with trying to use “nature” to make sour/funky beers… at least for now.

Cheers!

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