Success in Sours

1) Experience
2) Luck

Yeast/Bugs

Most all of your flavor in sours are coming from your yeast/bacteria. Don’t skimp on sourcing these and spend some time learning about them.

’Sours’ is pretty broad, but here are some things I do sometimes:

1. A good way to quick-sour without the excessively-long sparging and stinking grain of a sour mash is this: mash as usual, sparge as usual, empty mash tun, then return wort to mash tun with a handful of grain. Leave for a day or two to sour. The mash tun’s insulation keeps the wort hot enough to encourage lacto fermentation. After this you boil to fix the sourness and ferment.

2. If you want to add bugs, mash high. You want lots of bug food left around after your neutral strain has finished fermenting. Bugs from commercial sour beers are better than bugs from Wyeast/White labs, by and large. So if you want bugs, make sure at least some of then come from bottle dregs.

3. If you don’t need lacto fermentation characteristics, acidulated malt is a nice, easy, quick way to make a sour beer. I recently made a very heavily dry-hopped pale ale with 10% acidulated malt instead of bittering hops. It has exactly the clean sourness I want to compliment the fruitiness of the hops and it took no longer than, and is no more risky than, a normal, unsour beer.

Let me revise my list:

1) Wishes
2) Dreams
3) Fairydust

4) Spiders

1) Dregs
2) Patience
3) Luck

Originally posted by levifunk
Yeast/Bugs

Most all of your flavor in sours are coming from your yeast/bacteria. Don’t skimp on sourcing these and spend some time learning about them.

1) Let someone else make them

2) Drink at fests after your palate is shot from drinking good beer

3) Ignore them otherwise



YMMV. :-)

There are lots of way to get to a good sour, but these are my go-to’s:
1. Aged hops or low IBU by other means
2. Sour mash or give the lacto a good head start, or lots of time
3. Something for the sourness to play against. Either an interesting grain bill (Flanders Red) or an interesting fruit (Kriek)

And yes, find a way to leave something for the bugs to eat. Mash hot, add them early or whatever. Remember that Lactobacillus is anaerobic and not a huge fan of alcohol.

1. Turbid mashes are rad
2. Aged hops are rad, but a very small amount of fresh ones is too.
3. Blending.