First Berliner Weisse-sour beer Questions

If you’re using the cartons of Good Belly use the Mango. It has the least flavor impact on the final beer. 1/2 Carton works great for 5-6 gallons. Don’t pitch it straight out of the fridge into 100* wort. Get it to room temp at least.

If you can keep heat constant 92-95 is optimum I’ve found for that yeast. You can get to 3.5ish pH in 16-18 hours.

Pre Acidify to 4.5 after the boil. Helps keep the nasties at bay and supposedly helps with head retention.

You don’t need to worry about separate gear if you boil after you hit the pH you’re looking for. It kills everything.

Use done yeast nutrient and make sure yes a healthy pitch of yeast. You’re pitching the yeast into a little more hostile environment. It needs to be as heathy and happy as possible to perform. 1056 works great, probably US05. 1007 is a super resilient yeast that you can beat the crap out of and it’ll still perform.

 

Yes, acidify after the first boil. By the time of the second boil you should be well below that pH.

GoodBelly makes a product that is available (at the Whole Foods) where I live called a SuperShot or something like that. It's not juice, it's a little carton of probiotics. It has a lot of cells and has worked well for me. (There are cartons with a lower cell count that have also worked fine.) I've never used the juice.

 

You mentioned wanting to get this soured in 24 hours. Assuming you're talking about a pH of, say, 3.5, that's pretty fast. In my experience, you may need to use all four Goodbelly shots to get there in 24-ish hours. Also, @wasatchback is right on about pre-acidification. For 5 gallons of wort, I find that about 8-9 ml of lactic acid (88%) gets me to 4.5-ish. Of course it depends on the wort, but with that amount of lactic acid, it's unlikely to take it much too far because of the log nature of pH. He's also correct about the temperature. 95F or a hair lower is best for L. plantarum. 100F would work, but more slowly.

A final thought on time and pitch rate... a lot depends on the freshness of your L. plantarum source. I was surprised that @wasatchback is getting 5-6 gallons of wort to 3.5 pH in 16-18 hours with a half carton of Goodbelly. 1/2 carton is equivalent to two PlusShots or two StraightShots. I guess YMMV!

 

Only done 4 kettle sours. Always used 1/2 a carton of Mango. First one I did was a straight Berliner, no fruit and the mango flavor was undetectable. First time I kept it at 105 and it took longer to acidify. Since then I’ve done them between 90 and 95 and it’s always close to 3.5-3.55 in that 16-18 hour window if I acidify to 4.5. Just did one a few weeks ago. Just keep the O2 at bay when you’re souring.

 

I agree with what others have written above. I've never had to sour my wort on a very fast timeline because I always co-pitch yeast and bacteria, so I can't advise on how fast the GoodBelly probiotics work. I've generally used 1-2 cartons for a 5-gallon batch and it has worked well.

 

I use goodbelly exclusively for my quick sours.

I normally try and get the flavor shots with the oat flavor. It is literally flavorless. I always use 2 of them (out of a 4 pack) and start at 95F and let it freefall for 72 hours. I never boil after the souring process because it seems that once you add the clean yeast it never gets more acidic. That's a personal anecdote of course, but one that's been true for a few years now.

You can also dry hop after the initial souring phase with a small amount of hops (<1 oz).

I've had success with US05 or WLP644. Cheers.

 

Personally, I wouldn't sour wort (long contact time) in aluminum. As far as boiling the soured wort (~ an hour) in an aluminum kettle, I wouldn't be too concerned about it, especially if the kettle is well passivated. But I am not a metallurgist or a doctor, so please don't just take my word for it.

 

I'm not sure about the aluminum issue. Let me ask a question though - why not just copitch the yeast and bacteria? That way you don't have to worry about the pH during the boil. The nice thing about L. Plantarum is that it is extremely hop-sensitive, so even if the bacteria is hard to get rid of in your fermenter (which hasn't been my experience with Lactobacillus, by the way), it's not going to infect any beer with non-negligible amounts of hops.

 

I would keep in mind that hops don't actually kill Lactobacillus. They make it hard for Lacto to take in nutrients, resulting in reduced or no cell divisions. I'm fairly sure the Lacto cells can recover once the hop compounds are removed from the picture. To me, this is enough reason to continue "kettle" souring, followed by a boil, avoiding any potential future cold-side issues. I'd also keep in mind that some Lacto species/strains are more tolerant of hops than others. Fortunately, L. plantarum is not very tolerant at all.

 

That would work, but you could also do a full boil. Up to you. The point is just that the Lacto goes in after the last boil, so that it survives into the beer (along with the yeast).

To VikeMan's point, I maintain two separate sets of fermenters, siphons, etc. One set is for "clean" beers and one set is for beers with "bugs." Any time I use Brettanomyces, it goes into the "bugs" set. But if I'm only pitching yeast and GoodBelly, I will use the "clean" set, because I don't want Brett contamination and I don't fear Lacto contamination. Another way of putting it is that to me, L. plantarum is "clean" for brewing purposes.

So all I can say is that despite using Lacto in my "clean" equipment many times, I've never had an unwanted Lacto presence in my beer. I suppose it's possible that if I brewed a very lightly hopped (but clean) beer, I would run into some trouble (due to a lack of hops to suppress the Lacto), but I'm inclined to doubt it. The cell count after cleaning and sanitizing the fermenter must be very low, and unlike Brettanomyces I don't think Lacto can do a lot with a small number of cells.

I could be wrong though. Certainly the safer thing to do from a contamination perspective is isolating your Lacto beers from your clean ones. I just haven't found it necessary and haven't paid any price for my laziness (yet).

 

Yeah, you'll figure out what works for you. Kegs in particular are probably safe, though, because I don't think there's any way Lacto is going to create problems at 40°F.

 

If your going to do that i would sour in the keg,transfer it to the kettle to boil,then add some boiling water to the keg to kill everything. It would be easy to take samples and keep the O2 out. Maybe i'm missing something. You could probably ferment in the keg without making a mess since it's a low abv.