Anyone have any good methods for creating an overly sour Berliner? I usually use Milk The Funk's method but I'm looking to make a super sour beer. Will increasing the amount of lacto that I add make it more sour? Will holding the temp higher make it more sour?
You might want to post this in the Homebrewing forum. You'll likely get a better response over there. Good luck!
No idea why you'd want to do this, but increasing the temperature of souring will probably just kill your lactic acid bacteria. You could always sour for longer at the optimum temperature for your microbe(s), but every LAB has its pH limit.
I sour at up to 120 for extended amounts of time and produce a very puckery sour in a month or so...LABs can handle that heat and eventually you'll start selecting for cells that are more heat tolerable and they will then reproduce to form a new "colony" of better fit LABs for those temps. If you're making kettle soured/sour wort Berliners then you will always have to deal with the boring one dimensional sour that they produce. I'm assuming that you are making a true sour beer with a mixed culture and longer term souring. I would suggest to the OP to first pay attention to the type of souring bugs you're tossing into your wort. If you are using 1 species, then you are really limiting your final product IMO. I like to sour with around 3-4 lacto species (at least plantarum and brevis, but usually a couple more species) for my Berliners and I like a little Brett lambicus to round the flavor profile into shape and chew up any off flavors/chemicals (and original Berliners have a little Brett in them as well). I reuse yeast and bug cakes, so I do the MTF no boil Berliner and cool to 120, then add the hot wort onto the cake and leave it in a very hot room until I'm ready to keg it. I can turn a nice tart Berliner around this way in a month or so!
It's important to note that optimum fermentation temperature is species specific and can vary quite widely.
What kind of PH are your shooting for? I get my kettle sours to 3.3 in 16 hours or so and that are pretty damn tart!
All lacto species I've pitched have survived (or at least the one time I looked at them in a scope) at those temps.
I believe L Planatarum will get you the lowest PH, and definitely in the shortest period of time.. it works quickest in the 90s. But does lowest PH = super sour? I'm not sure
If you bottle condition, the low-PH acidity that comes with extreme tartness could stall out your yeast, so keep that in mind. If you force carb in a keg, then you don't have to worry about that, so you could always supplement with a bunch of straight lactic acid to get an extreme level of tartness. I'm convinced that this is what Destihl Brewing does for their Wild Sour series. There's no way that bugs alone are achieving that level of tartness.
I don't know about everybody else, but my sours take twice as long to carbonate in a keg than my clean beers and brett beers. I can force carb most beers in around 3 days to an acceptable level and 5-7 days for prime carbonation, but my sours are usually still somewhat flat after 3 days and even after more than a week need more time to hit prime carbonation. Anybody else notice this? I have also found that I get better overall carbonation from bottling compared to kegging my sours...especially if there's any brett in the sour (which there should be for many styles).
