Poochops GF Brewday #4 summer fruit sour

Poochops · Jul 30, 2017

Mrs Poo loves a sour, she even set up an account on beerhawk and buys a dozen or so at a time which I never thought I'd see happen but I'm not complaining. It can be blimmin expensive though so I thought I'd give it a go.

The recipe is unashamadely borrowed from a post I saw on a Facebook group, except I'm going to split the batch.

1kg lager malt
1kg wheat malt
15g hallertauer mittlefreuh
A lacto source, in my case I'm trying 2 pots of yakult in a 1.040 1 litre starter
2kg frozen summer fruit from Tesco.

I first treated my tap water to take out all of the alkalinity, added 1ml AMS per litre to bring it down from 196ppm to 0ppm give or take, used 14.5 litre in the mash and 16.5 litre in the sparge.

Mashed 63 degrees for 40, 68 for 10, mash out 76 for ten.

I boiled it for ten minutes purely to sanitise my chiller then transferred it to a spare FV cooled to about 40 degrees so that I could wash the residue out of the GF. I thought about it afterwards and I come to the conclusion that I needn't have bothered but hey ho! The theory was that I didn't want a load of flour sitting on the base for 3-4 days because it might burn when I boil it again, but I'd be just as well giving it a good stir, doh!

Anyhow, I put 23.5 litres back in the kettle, set it to 40 degrees and added 15ml of 60% lactic acid to drop the ph from 5.6 to 4.3, this is to discourage any other bacteria taking hold along with the temp being ideal for lactobacillus to thrive it should be good. I placed a layer of cling film on top of the wort to stop oxygen transfer and then cling filmed the top of the pot as well. It's currently sat in the kitchen souring which should take a couple of days. I'll test it tomorrow and see where it's at.

Poochops · Jul 31, 2017

Well 48 hours later the wort is at ph3.1 so it's time to boil it and add the hops. The OG at this stage is 1.027. I'm splitting the batch to two 11.5 litre brews, one half is getting half of the recipe weight of mixed fruit which should yield about 70-100g of sugar, the other half is getting a dry hop of citra and lemon peel so no extra sugar. So Ive decided to add 500g of wheat DME which should get me another 7 gravity points on the 23 litres. That should do nicely.

Wort Tasted slightly sour, nothing to write home about though.

Poochops · Aug 3, 2017

Ok four days in and the CML kristallweizen yeast is working away doggedly. It got off to a quick start having been rehydrated in 200ml warm water which I then split a 100ml into each fermenter. It's plugged away nice and steady which was a relief given the low ph, but it's not breaking any land speed records! It's down to 1.012 presently.

Good news is that it's very pleasantly tart to taste, quite thin at the moment but the flavour has gone in tonight. Fv1 got the mixed fruit and fv2 got a 25g teabag of citra and the peel off a lemon. I'll let them be for 3-4 days now and then see where they're at.

Poochops · Aug 13, 2017

Took out the fruit and peel/hops after 4 days, earlier this week and gave it a taste. The lemon and citra was quite tasty actually and the sourness was mild but similar to the commercial ones that the Mrs buys. The mixed fruit was slightly more tart but the fruit flavour not particularly pronounced, not completely lacking, but quite subtle. Anyhow I left them to finish fermenting at 1.012.
Today they were well and truly finished but only got down to 1.010, I was expecting 1.004 so that's a bit of a pisser, abv will be about 2.3% similar again to some of the commercials but I was hoping for nearer 3% after priming but hey ho.
One thing I read was not to use lactic acid higher than .4ml per litre, well I used .6 to get to my pitching ph. and it can be perceived in the mouthfeel as slipperiness. Will remember next time
Bottled them with sugar to 3.5 volumes, I think with some good bubbleage these should be quite refreshing! We'll see in two weeks :smile: