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A little bit of background on our new SCOBY project series. These sour ales are fermented with a Kombucha SCOBY which stands for Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast. It is similar to how a mother of vinegar fermentation works in that it uses a really gross looking slimy blob of goo containing many different bacteria and yeast (see picture). Traditionally Kombucha is a mixture of sugar and tea and is only fermented to create carbonation, not necessarily alcohol. It is produced and consumed these days primarily for its probiotic qualities. Several years ago I played around at home with using this process to ferment grain sugar (beer wort) and lo and behold it worked.

It took me a while to get around to it, but we are finally starting to play around with this on a small scale here at the brewery. The idea is to produce a sour beer that is similar in sourness to a Lambic but at a bit lower alcohol, similar to a Berliner Weisse (about 3.5%). The big difference is that it only takes 3-4 weeks to produce whereas a traditional Lambic can take a year or more. This beer isn’t quite as complex as a year old Lambic, but for only 4 weeks old it does have a lot of things going on that are unique to this type of fermentation.

This will be the base beer for many other blended sours to come in the future. For now, you can true the pure, unadulterated, sour as a son of a bitch straight version that is SCOBY Project #1 aka "Mother Lover".

This concludes today’s "that’s like science and stuff" lesson.