Sour Part 1: Trial and Mostly Error

 A little bit of history. Not about Sours, some variety of sour has been around forever. The Belgian Lambic style can be traced back almost 800 years, and wild fermentation was the only way to create any alcohol for centuries. Once the industrial revolution happened and into the modern era, the development of Sour Ales has become more refined and far safer than previous generations. 

Using wild bacterium and yeast strains can be dangerous if not treated properly. Especially today, with the tighter regulations and more stringent health regulations, traditional souring has to be done in specific facilities, rather than wherever you want. Of course, people still do open ferments in their homes, but we don't suggest doing that around here (Southeastern Connecticut) due to all the nasties that live in our air. 

There are a ton of resources about souring these days, and we suggest taking a deep dive into the Milk the Funk Wiki if you really want to get into the nuts and bolts of souring and the vast amounts of science that has been recorded regarding these beers. http://www.milkthefunk.com/wiki/Main_Page

No, this is a history of OUR dalliances with the strange and potent Sour Ale. We have, to this point, been...less than successful in our attempts at brewing a Sour Ale. The very first attempt we made, back in the long long ago, was a Hefeweizen that featured habanero pepper. That went about as poorly as possible, however, the lessons we learned are still used to this day.

We made that Hef with anger in our hearts. We had no taste for the style as we hadn't had one that we liked and wanted to clone to that point. We were ignorant of the differences between Hefeweizen and Belgian Wit and American Wheat beers and it showed. The hot peppers were thrown in to make the beer so repellant that people would have permanent negative reactions to the very thought of the Hefeweizen, like adults do to vegetables their parents forced upon them during the formative years. We neglected to prepare the peppers properly, and paid the price.

The beer, upon racking into secondary fermentation, was sour. Astringent, even. Undrinkable to the point where we couldn't save it. We dumped it down the drain while playing sad songs to commemorate the passing of our most hubristic project. What we learned, however, was 1) we needed to drink more wheat beers and not be such jerks about them, and 2) how to prepare and sterilize the peppers for use in brewing. Proper use of vegetables and sterilizing them correctly will negate and naturally occurring bacteria that might live in the flesh of whatever foodstuff you might want to incorporate in you beer. 

Instead of just dumping the whole pepper it's important to remove the stem, core, seeds, and pith (the white part that runs the length of the inside. Even though the seeds will add heat, and if that's what you want, by all means leave them in, they also take away from the overall flavor of the pepper. The white pith and the rest of the non-flesh parts of the pepper created a flavor profile that was truly terrible, to the point where we couldn't save the experiment. We have since properly sterilized the peppers and maintained their wonderful flavor in each successive brew.

We have found that dicing the vegetable fairly small is important as well. Heat sterilizing in a dry pan, to the point where they are hot but not blistered is one of the more effective ways we have found to ensure the safety of your peppers. Obviously they will fume and make your work space spicy to the eye, so be extra careful if you are sensitive to such things. If you have a particularly large or hefty pepper, like a jalapeno, it would behoove you to cut them even smaller, brunoised, and simmer them in a cup of water for 15 minutes. Add the whole mixture to whatever stage you were planning and you won't see any loss of flavor, aroma, or spice. 

Needless to say, we learned most of our lesson there. Not all of it, though.

Fast forward several, maybe a dozen, years. As part of our ongoing efforts to make the beers of the times, we decided to make a kettle sour. We had a recipe built, got ourselves a lacto strain that we thought would work, and were ready to go. We mashed, sparged, and brought our wort to a hot break. Everything was going well, so we pitched our bacterial strain and let it rip. Unfortunately, we didn't have something to properly regulate the temperature of the vessel we were souring. 

Morons.

Where normal souring takes between 24 and 72 hours, we waited on this big bastard for a solid 6 days. Eventually, the pH got "close enough" to the 4.5 that we desired and went ahead with the brew. We boiled, added a late hop addition (1 oz Sovereign), chilled, and pitched yeast like we normally do. We monitored the primary fermentation, performed in a glass carboy, very closely. It seemed to be rolling fine, but there was unusual activity there that we were not used to. We deduced, like a drunken Sherlock Holmes, that this was a normal thing due to the bacterial that might still be working in the fermentation. We were kind of right.

We racked into a secondary vessel to add our fruit, raspberries. When we learned the lessons regarding sterilizing peppers, we decided to ignore our past mistakes entirely when it came to the fruit addition. The first mistake we made was buying frozen berries and leaving them in our keezer for too long. Because it took so long for the beer to sour, the berries thawed completely, and the bag expanded, becoming puffy and full of gas. That should have been a hint.

But we are morons.

Instead of making a sugarless compote out of the raspberry mush in the bag, therefore sterilizing the fruit and eliminating any free radicals that might have grown in the bag, we simply cut it open and dumped the contents into our secondary fermenter. Like morons would. 

We notices some airlock activity, but didn't think anything of it. When we were good and ready to bottle, about a week later, we opened our vessel and were greeted with quite the surprise. Whatever was in that bag that we, for some reason, decided not to deal with, had come back with a vengeance. We looked into the fermenter and saw a blue bacterial krausen. The layer of Smurf colored foam stank like infection and failure. 

With sad songs in our hearts, we walked the vessel outside, stood above a storm drain, and dumped the poisoned beer into the sewer. I'm sure the rodents were happy and drunk, but the humans who spent all that time and energy were drinking for a different reason. 

Everything that we had learned we ignored. We wasted product because we were lazy and thought that a pre-pasteurized product wouldn't be so dangerous. We were wrong. So as we embark on this next Sour Ale experience, we are documenting it all, not taking any shortcuts, and ensuring that every step in the process is done with precision and an abundance of caution.

Cheers!