It’s finally time to dive into making some sour beer. John and I have certainly talked about sour beers and brewing them a few times. However, sour beer making isn’t something we’ve discussed much here on the blog. Well, that’s about to change.
To get started in the process, I thought I’d try my hand at collecting and culturing up some souring microbes from a bottle of one of my favorite sour brews, Petrus Oud Bruin. I like this beer because it has a solid level of sourness to it, yet the underlying malt backbone of a brown beer and the wood character from the barrel aging create a nice complexity.
Why collect organisms from a bottle of commercial beer??? Why not! Its the DIY/Homebrew way. My plans for 2014 still include getting some Roselare blend from Wyeast and brew something with that. Lately though, I’ve been reading about sour beers at home. I’ve been listening to podcasts about sour beers. My palate was starting to crave some nice acidic funk. When I went to the fridge, I decided to try and collect some microbes from some Oud Bruin and see what happens.
The primary things to keep in mind when trying to culture some bottles microbes:
1. Start small. I pitched under 200ml of starter wort right into the bottle. You want to keep what microbes you have at a fairly high enough density so they don’t have the need to overgrow right away.
2. Low gravity. I kept my starter wort to under 1.030. The initial phases of recovering dormant yeast or resuscitating what few are still alive requires a low stress environment. Now is not the time to supply a lot of nutrients to overwhelm your culture. Just enough to wake them up and get them revived.
3. Keep it clean. You want to focus on the microbes in the bottle. Sanitation is still key here. Picking up a healthier wild contaminant form the air or bottle will likely quickly over take the population you are trying to nurse back into growing.
Over the next couple days I plan to monitor this mini-wort and see how things are coming along. In a 3-5 days if things look interesting I’ll double the volume, pitching the whole thing into a flask with a stir bar and see what happens. Then I plan to start monitoring the gravity and maybe even check the pH as an indicator of bacterial activity.
Stay tuned and we’ll see where this first step of harvesting bottle dregs for sour brewing takes me.
BREW ON!
dcHokie
FYI, I reached out to Bavik last month and unfortunately the Petrus beers are now filtered and pasteurized.
Jeff
Did you see any sediment in the bottle? A recent thread at homebrewtalk suggests that Bavik started filtering their beer in the past year or so:
http://www.homebrewtalk.com/f127/does-petrus-have-viable-dregs-441470/#post5800539
Good luck with the starter, hopefully your bottle is pre-filtering.
Mike
Jeff
Yeah I was concerned at first because from the outside of the bottle it looks pretty clean. I didn’t want to tip it over too much because that would have stirred up the sediment if there was any. But when I poured the beer I could see some stuff coming as the last bit of the beer came out.
I hope I get something. When I decant the mini starter (refresher we should call it) I might save what dregs are in the bottle and I’ll plate them out on agar to see what’s there!
Karl
Hi, you don’t really need to step it up (since it’s already at its “perfect” blend).
Also, you shouldn’t really aerate your culture since it probably includes Acetobacter and Pediococcus and they don’t like O2.
Start brewing sours! It’s very fun and rewarding (if doing it “right”).
Roeselare is awesome.
Cheers from Sweden.