For an upcoming Gose, I'm going to try a Lacto starter as opposed to my typical 4-5 day sour mash that I do with my Berliners. Looking to do 2L of 1.040 boiled wort from DME, pH 5.5 and tossing in 4 oz of crushed grain and keeping the 2L Erlenmeyer flask in a crockpot of water at 120 F. Gonna let it ride for 7 -10 days. I saw in a scholarly brewing article that Lactobacillus delbruckiii propogates optimally in 5.5 pH wort. Anyone use this method? If so, how'd the beer(s) turn out?
@jae , I may throw in some table sugar for simple sugar for the lacto to take off on initially. I looked around my list of homebrew blogs for this topic and actually found this to be helpful, method 3. Hope my starter turns out as well as his did!
A question for @hoptualBrew or anyone else with experience making lacto starters: if you refrigerate the starter, will the lacto behave like yeast (that is, drop to the bottom) so that you can decant off most of the liquid? I suppose I would be willing to add that amount of starter liquid to my beer, but I would rather not if I could help it.
I have done both grain and dregs starters. The bacteria will accumulate at the bottom if crashed in my experience. The issue I have had with grain starters is that the grain will accumulate there too, so getting the bacteria and grain separated in a sanitary way will be difficult. To avoid this I have done a smaller starter of the grains (apple juice), got it going, let the grain drop out, give it a swirl to get the bacteria in suspension, decant the entire starter into another container leaving the grains behind and adding more juice to step up the starter. After that, crash and decant. I will be crashing my Cascade starter and decanting this weekend for my Berlinerweisse.
I'll be doing a 100% DME starter with some phosphoric acid to pH 5.5, temp hold 7 days 120 F crockpot and just straining it at pitch with a sanitized strainer into the fermenter. I plan to pitch the whole starter. @jbakajust1 I theorize that feeding the starter a QOD alkaline dose to attempt to keep the pH around the optimal 5.5 range will help with L. delbruckiii propagation. But I'll have to mess with that at a later date.
