It Puts the Yoghurt in the Wort
Like homebrewers everywhere, we have recently caught the kettle souring bug. How can you blame us? The prospect of producing quick sour beers in a matter of weeks, not months (or years), is too tempting not to consider.
As our first kettle sour beer, we wanted to keep things as simple as possible, just to get a basic idea of the process. The plan: make a simple low OG wort from extract, pitch a tube of pure lacto and then let the wort sour using a sous vide circulator for a couple of days until the desired tartness was reached. The problem: our LHBS was fresh out of lacto! Thankfully, Milk That Funk has a helpful resource on alternative sources of souring bacteria.
We ultimately decided to make an attempt at culturing lactobacillus using yoghurt. The process was fairly simple: make a simple starter wort, add a couple spoons of yogurt (we used Fage non-fat Greek yoghurt), and maintain a temperature of around 40 celsius overnight. The lacto starter was then pitched into the full extract wort as intended.
After around 2.5 days souring, the wort was definitely sour - fairly assertive but not overly so. The wort seemed different than usual (aside from the sourness), with a tiny bit of Chinese herbal tea going on. It didn't taste like anything had gone seriously wrong, however, and we decided to go ahead with the beer (a cherry saison - see recipe below). We'll see how it looks in a few weeks.
What you see above is a few of the beers we had submitted to the (only) home brew competition in Hong Kong. We didn't win anything, but we got some very good feedback and felt we were trending in the right direction with our beers overall! The citra pale ale (from our 26 February 2016 post) and the raspberry saison were highlights. We'll have a separate update on these beers soon, hopefully.
D
Sour Cherry Saison Recipe Specifics ------------------- Batch Size (Gal): 3.00 Total Grain (Lbs): 3 lbs Anticipated OG: 1.040 Anticipated IBU: 12.00 Wort Boil Time: 60 Minutes Extract ---------------- 3.00 lbs Briess Pilsen Light DME Hops ------ 0.40 oz Saaz (pellet, 4.00% AA) @ 60 min Yeast ------ Danstar Belle Saison Others ----------------- 1 litre Sour Cherry Juice Notes ------- 26 April 2016:Prepared yoghurt starter.Mixed 1 litre of filtered water with 100g of DME, boiled 5 minutes and chilled to 40 c.Added around 2 tsp of Fage non-fat Greek yoghurt, held at 40 c. 27 April 2016:Mixed DME into 1 gal of distilled water and 2 gal of filtered water, boiled 5 minutes and chilled to 40 c.Swirled yoghurt starter and pitched into wort.Held wort at 40 c using sous vide circulator. Brewed 30 April 2016. Boiled soured wort.Added 1 litre of sour cherry juice with 5 minutes left in boil, topped with filtered water to reach 3.0 gal. Measured OG at 1.040. Shook briefly to aerate, pitched rehydrated dry yeast.Chilled to 66F overnight.