Making a sour beer

Listen to "The Sour Hour" podcast on The Brewing Network, from the beginning. Also read American Sour Beers.

 

I give this advice a lot on this forum, but you could do a lot worse than checking out @OldSock's website (from which you might consider purchasing his excellent book on sour beers). Milk the Funk is another very helpful website. You can also search this forum for "Berliner" or "gose" and see what others have tried.

My own advice is to brew a gose, not kettle-soured, but actually fermented with lacto and yeast. I had a great experience with the following approach:

• brew a gose based on @OldSock's recipe, but don't include any hops
• be sure to get nice, good-tasting coriander, as fresh as possible
• when the boil is over, chill to 100°F and rack to the fermenter
• pitch lacto bugs (but no yeast) and insulate the fermenter
• 12-24 hours later, chill (or allow to cool) to 70°F and pitch US-05
• hold at 70°F ambient for the remainder of the fermentation, which should proceed normally
• package normally (e.g., bottle as you usually would, with a medium amount of priming sugar)

As for lacto bugs, I have had good success with Wyeast's 5335 lactobacillus. Others have reported good results with Omega Yeast's lacto blend, which allegedly works at room temperature (I haven't tried it so I can't say). And I see that Yeast Bay has a lacto blend too. You can get a lot of information on lacto from Milk the Funk's lacto page. And if you're adventurous and/or frugal, you can try one of the approaches outlined on Milk the Funk's "alternative bacteria sources" page. But to be honest, for your first attempt I would just use commercial lacto. If you feel the need, you can culture them up via the method developed by Eureka Brewing, but for a 5-gallon batch I actually think you can get away with just pitching the package (assuming it's fresh and well maintained, i.e., it's been continuously refrigerated—luckily it's a good season for shipping yeast and bacteria if you order them online).

The reason I am recommending this approach is that it is fairly easy and it gets you a sour beer very quickly, and in my experience it is delicious. In particular, the combination of the tartness from the lacto, the peachy flavors from warm-fermented US-05, and the fruitiness of the coriander is spectacular. More complicated sour beers can take months or even a year to develop. (By the way, my recommendation is about an ounce of salt per 5 gallons, maybe a little less, but this is very much a matter of taste.)

Note that you might consider getting a separate auto-siphon, tubing, fermenter, and bottling bucket for your sour beers. If you're only using lacto, I actually think this is a bit on the conservative side, since lacto is very hop-sensitive and fragile. But it is true that if you use the same cold-side equipment for both sour and clean beers you are running at least some risk of ending up with tartness in what was intended to be a clean beer.

Oh by the way, right now I think the New York City area Whole Foods are selling Westbrook Gose. I'd recommend picking up a 6-pack and seeing if it's to your taste. You're not going to replicate that beer exactly, but it'll give you an idea of what a well-made gose tastes like.

 

Gose has a lot of wheat in it, but personally I can't detect the wheat character behind all the other flavors. I imagine you could cut way back on the wheat (substituting pilsner malt) and brew a delicious beer.

 

American Sours.book

 

Patience.

 

The process for making a sour isn't dramatically different from any other beer - the only thing is patience (as LakesideBrewing just mentioned) and making sure that your equipment is clean before and after - especially after; you don't want bugs contaminating your non-sour beers afterwards.
My first sour was from MoreBeer, a clone of Russian River's Consecration. It's a brown ale aged on currants, wine barrel staves and sour bugs. I brewed the beer as usual, primary fermentation on regular ale yeast (don't remember which; I'd have to check my notes) then transferred into secondary - and this is where I recommend using a glass carboy (easier to sanitize berfore and after) and dedicated sour hoses from here out. Added the currents and sour bug blend. Let age for a year, tasting occasionally before bottling. This was about 5 years ago, and it's still drinking great - I have a few bottles left. I should probably think about brewing this again, so I have more in the pipeline.

 

As luck would have it, @OldSock has a new gose recipe up (with tasting notes), and this recipe uses no wheat at all, so maybe it would be a good one for @TooHopTooHandle to try. I wouldn't mechanically follow @OldSock's recipe—the recipe calls for no boil, but as he notes, "With the maltier grist the no-boil flavor was more assertive when young than similar all Pils/wheat beers that I've brewed - I might go for a 60 minute boil." He also uses considerably less coriander and salt than I have found to be enjoyable, about half as much of each as I would recommend. But that's a very subjective judgment, and there's a good argument for being conservative with your first batch. (It is also possible, at least in theory, to add salt to taste at the bottling stage.) Also, as described below, it's possible that his coriander is much more flavorful than what I've been able to find, which would explain my need to use more.

The one thing I've struggled with is finding the high-quality Indian coriander that he writes about. I went to the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan, which has a lot of Indian stores, and I bought coriander from several of them. Without exception, it was all disappointing, certainly no better or fresher than what I can get in a decent all-purpose grocery store. I also haven't been able to find any information about Indian strains of coriander, as opposed to the normal varieties you might find in the U.S. So I am on the lookout for a good source of coriander, and I would appreciate any tips.

 

One of my favorite spice sources is from Yonkers. Not sure if they have a store.
https://www.myspicesage.com/coriander-seeds-p-97.html

 

Thanks! This place looks great. They have free shipping, which is actually better for me than a physical store. Yonkers is close as the crow flies, but not easy for me to get to.

Is this a homebrew club in NYC? If so which one?

 

I'd suggest sour worting with lacto first to get a feel for a 'quick turn around' sour. It will give you that tarty pucker that you're after, without the long wait.

If you do want to go the 'long sour' route with a brett/pedio combo, the end result will be more complex, and your patience will be rewarded! I'd mash high, or add maltodextrin to the boil. This will give your beer some extra fermentables (more complex sugars) for your sour bugs to slowly munch on over the long course of secondary. Just go easy on the IBUs. I've had great results with pitching a brett/sacch blend for primary, and pitching sour dregs into secondary. Crooked Stave's Surrette has never disappointed. It's an aggressive blend that produces great sours. Bottle prime with some champagne yeast. Because of such a long secondary, it's a perfect time to add oak/fruit as well.

 

http://www.milkthefunk.com/ and http://www.milkthefunk.com/wiki/Table_of_Contents#Brewing_Techniques
This is one of the best resources on sour beers on the net...I basically brew the No Boil Berliner Weisse recipe as my base recipe for most any sour I make and have never been disappointed! Go with extended souring instead of a quick sour method for a true sour complexity. Quick souring methods make the beer more one dimensional and boring compared to simply letting the batch age on some bugs and yeast for a few months to develop the proper flavor profile for a sour beer. If you brew and repitch onto a bug/yeast cake that you just kegged off of, you'll always have a sour beer ready when the previous one runs out. A brew day with the no boil method, including kegging the previous batch, is usually around 2 hours as well!

 

Glad to help!