Sour worting / Kettle souring with Lacto probiotics:

[Hop Bomb]

Its super cheap & very effective. Im doing a piece for wiki but il post the important bits here so ye can get cracking & not have to wait two months for the info.

BIO-KULT:  Available from health food stores here. Has 9 strains of lacto in it. Its cheap. And works amazingly well (so much so we will never buy commercial pitch from wyeast again - saving of 300e per brew)  (note: bio kult contains spore forming bacteria so you will need to hot caustic soak your souring vessel to kill it)

I made a little starter of 1.2 litres of pasteurised 1040 wort. Added four capsules. Purged with c02, sealed the jar & swirled it. Pitched that to 80 litres of pasteurised 1040 wort & achieved a ph drop to 3.2 in 18 hours. Very clean, great tartness, all apple pie/bramley apple & lemon. No ham or mustiness like with some sour worting Ive done with grain on previous batches.

I also did another 80 litre starter along side this one. This was same wort, but no 4 capsule starter. Instead i chucked in 24 capsules. This achieved the same PH drop but a bit quicker, & it tasted better.

Both starters dropped 4 gravity points over the course of the souring.  Great clean tartness. Total winner!

From here you can boil as normal. Add your hops, chill & transfer to your FV & pitch your sacch or brett strain of choice to finish out.


For commercial brewers:

I pitched both of those 80 litre starters to 2000 litres of 1066 wort.  Dropped from 5.2 to 3.1 ph in 44 hours. Great clean tartness. BUT unlike the starters which had only a 4 gravity point drop - this 2000L batch dropped 20 points. I had anticipated something like this might happen hence going in at 1066. (if it dropped I was covered - if not I could dilute back & get 400 litres more beer) Im guessing I had a sacch contamination during the kettle souring or else one or more of the homo lacto strains became the dominant one during the kettle souring. Still tastes great, hit my OG for the sacch yeast pitch & saved 300e. Its also a big time saver too as it dropped to 3.3 ph after only 12 hours. So if you are brewing a mildly tart beer (like say GBB desperate mile which was 3.3ph) you can boil much quicker into the souring process, cutting production time.

Hope this helps.  Proper wiki thing towards end of summer when this beer is ready & packaged.

[DEMPSEY]

Its super cheap & very effective. Im doing a piece for wiki but il post the important bits here so ye can get cracking & not have to wait two months for the info.

BIO-KULT:  Available from health food stores here. Has 9 strains of lacto in it. Its cheap. And works amazingly well (so much so we will never buy commercial pitch from wyeast again - saving of 300e per brew)  (note: bio kult contains spore forming bacteria so you will need to hot caustic soak your souring vessel to kill it)

I made a little starter of 1.2 litres of pasteurised 1040 wort. Added four capsules. Purged with c02, sealed the jar & swirled it. Pitched that to 80 litres of pasteurised 1040 wort & achieved a ph drop to 3.2 in 18 hours. Very clean, great tartness, all apple pie/bramley apple & lemon. No ham or mustiness like with some sour worting Ive done with grain on previous batches.

I also did another 80 litre starter along side this one. This was same wort, but no 4 capsule starter. Instead i chucked in 24 capsules. This achieved the same PH drop but a bit quicker, & it tasted better.

Both starters dropped 4 gravity points over the course of the souring.  Great clean tartness. Total winner!

From here you can boil as normal. Add your hops, chill & transfer to your FV & pitch your sacch or brett strain of choice to finish out.


For commercial brewers:

I pitched both of those 80 litre starters to 2000 litres of 1066 wort.  Dropped from 5.2 to 3.1 ph in 44 hours. Great clean tartness. BUT unlike the starters which had only a 4 gravity point drop - this 2000L batch dropped 20 points. I had anticipated something like this might happen hence going in at 1066. (if it dropped I was covered - if not I could dilute back & get 400 litres more beer) Im guessing I had a sacch contamination during the kettle souring or else one or more of the homo lacto strains became the dominant one during the kettle souring. Still tastes great, hit my OG for the sacch yeast pitch & saved 300e. Its also a big time saver too as it dropped to 3.3 ph after only 12 hours. So if you are brewing a mildly tart beer (like say GBB desperate mile which was 3.3ph) you can boil much quicker into the souring process, cutting production time.

Hope this helps.  Proper wiki thing towards end of summer when this beer is ready & packaged.

Excellent info there, .

[nigel_c]

I can see boots being hammered for bio-kult all around the country very soon. Thanks for the info.

[Andrew_Rowley]

Wow fantastic write up. Though have to laugh at the size of your starter of 80l. Bigger than I would imagine most homebrew set ups.

[Paul B]

This is really cool thanks for sharing. What temperature did you hold the starter/kettle at while souring?

[Hop Bomb]

My mash tun & HLT are both 80l thermo pots so they hardly lose any heat when full. Perfect for lacto incubation. Temp was 40c & only dropped to 38c by end of souring. (souring was wednesday morning to Fri evening on the 80 litre starters) A cooler box would do a great job at maintaining temp also.

[Simon_]

Presumably you'd only use 1 capsule for a ~20L batch. What sort of starter size and step up would you use for a 20L batch?

[Chrisward94]

4 capsules is the same cell count as a wyeast smack pack. So use at least 4. Let that grow for 48 hours (limit oxygen exposure & purge with co2 if you can) & pitch that to your 5 gallon batch. Or if you dont want to do a starter just use more capsules of lacto into 5 gallons of wort.

(Tom here posting from Chris' account)

[UpsidedownA (Andrew)]

For commercial brewers:

I pitched both of those 80 litre starters to 2000 litres of 1066 wort.  Dropped from 5.2 to 3.1 ph in 44 hours. Great clean tartness. BUT unlike the starters which had only a 4 gravity point drop - this 2000L batch dropped 20 points. I had anticipated something like this might happen hence going in at 1066. (if it dropped I was covered - if not I could dilute back & get 400 litres more beer) Im guessing I had a sacch contamination during the kettle souring or else one or more of the homo lacto strains became the dominant one during the kettle souring. Still tastes great, hit my OG for the sacch yeast pitch & saved 300e. Its also a big time saver too as it dropped to 3.3 ph after only 12 hours. So if you are brewing a mildly tart beer (like say GBB desperate mile which was 3.3ph) you can boil much quicker into the souring process, cutting production time.

Hope this helps.  Proper wiki thing towards end of summer when this beer is ready & packaged.

That's fascinating. Thanks for sharing. How do you calculate ABV if gravity is dropping due to the lactics? Are you measuring the drop before the boil and before adding yeast? I guess any alcohol produced before the boil will be boiled off so you don't have to worry about that.

[Simon_]

Have started my first attempt at a Berliner Weissen and I've used Bio-Cult and unmilled grain together to try and get a lacto culture growing.

1.5kg of pale ale malt, 1.5Kg Wheat, 350g Acid Malt, no hops mashed at ~64.5c. Boiled for ~15 mins
Chilled to 47c and filled a corny leaving about 3" head space. Collected 1L for a Kolsch starter.   

pH after the mash was 5.12. After the boil was about the same. I was hoping for it to be alot lower with over 10% acid malt. gravity was 1.035.
I dropped 5 capsules of Bio-cult into the wort and then a sterile hop bag with 220g of unmilled pale ale malt for good measure.

I sealed the corny, purged it with mixed gas. Connected a ferm wrap and temp probe and wrapped carpet underlay and a hoody and stuck it in the fridge. It was reading 36c now but in hindsight it couldn't have dropped so quickly. The temp probe was near the bottom of the outside of the corny and there's probably a big temp difference the length of the corny. I set the temp for 43c

I took a sample 9 hours later and it had only dropped to 4.88. Hot sample tasted nice and clean and sweet like honey and slightly tart (might be wishful). Added 4 more Bio-cult and purged again. Bumped the temp up to 44c

Checked it this morning and the temp was reading 45c. Gave it a shake and it went up to 49c by the time I stopped watching it. I might've cooked any lacto culture. I need to find a better way of getting a more uniform temp in a corny. Putting it on its side might do this.

[Hop Bomb]

Doing it in your boil kettle allows you to boil & kill the lacto in the wort & hopefully nukes it from your kettle too. You've soured your corny. No big deal if yer gona keep it for sours I guess.

The berliner is probably fine though. Any homebrew kettle sours or big starters I do for the 20hl kettle sours at GBB take 3-4 days to get to where you want them taste & ph wise. (We get pretty rapid souring once those starters are pitched to the full volume of wort though)  Pitch at 40c & they usually drop to 24c by end of souring. On my homebrew lacto sours I can maintain constant temp in my thermo pot HLT. Its a great incubator once its full to the brim. Limits oxygen too which is a bonus.

If you have cooked it just chill it back to 40c or below & throw a bunch more biokult lads in. Then leave it alone temp wise. Im pitching 30 biokults per 100 litres if thats any use to you.

[nigel_c]

I was talking to Rick in the RDS about his sour. I asked what way he did it and he said he just poured yogurt in and kettle soured it that was. I suppose you could get some funky flavors if you went down the Muller fruit corner rout 

[Simon_]

Yeah I thought long and hard about which vessel to use and with cornies you can purge them, they'll heat better with a fermwrap than plastic and they cost about the same as a plastic carboy at the minute

[Simon_]

31 hours in and I'm down to 4.07.  Tastes like apple juice mixed with honey. No funky tastes or smells.

temp was reading 51c  which was mad because the trip switch had blown for the shed so it was probably way higher earlier. Might be able to get a rolling boil with this fermwrap

[Hop Bomb]

Apples sounds right. Always reminds me of my grannies apple tart. Any lactic tartness yet?