Beer Forum

Hey guys,

I'm brewing a saison this week for a competition in two months and I wanted to add a little tartness to the beer. The finished product will be kegged, force carbed, and bottled from there. I've considered the many options available and am wondering if you guys have any ideas I could use to add some sour to the beer. Below are my ideas on how I want to do this and my reasons for/against them:

1. Adding lactic acid to finished beer.
This might be enough for me as I only want a little sour, but I hear it's very common to get diacetyl if you add too much, and I don't want to screw up this beer up. I'm also worried it won't be what I'm looking for, as I hear it's pretty bland.

2. Doing a sour mash and blending it with the beer.
I read over the process and it sounds a bit difficult to do unless you have an easy way of controlling the temperature. If anyone has tried this method and can chime in, I'd love to hear your input, especially if you can tell me how long it takes for the souring to begin or how many lbs of grain they used, etc.

3. Doing a gallon of a sour, pasteurizing it, and adding it to the beer.
This is the direction I'm leaning towards, but I can't find any information on if anyone has actually tried this. My idea would be to grab a gallon or so of the wort and add the dreg from a crooked stave bottle. Let it ferment for a month and a half or so, pasteurize it by bringing the temp up to ~150*F to kill the yeast, and blend it with my saison before bottling. I've heard many issues with BOILING the finished beer, but I haven't heard much about the effects a sour would have just heating it up enough to kill the active yeast. And I definitely don't want this beer to continue fermenting after bottling.

Thanks for any input!

Out of all of your ideas I would say that two might be your best bet given your timeframe. Agreed that lactic acid sucks although you might want to try it in a sample glass and see if it is sufficient enough for what you are looking for as it is the easiest method you stated.

A sour mash can get you where you want to be with minor effort. A small amount can be done even with a handful of grains added to some boiled and cooled malt extract in a gallon or so. Try to eliminate any oxygen possible to avoid any off flavors in the mash. Temps around 100F for 3 days or so should get

a decent enough sourness for blending.

Option 3 will take too long to produce the desired sourness for blending. At least 4-6 mos will be needed for this if not much more.

If you are interested in performing a sour mash feel free to pm me for some tips.
Let us know which route you decided to go with...

Brewing tonight...

I purchased some lactic acid last night, tried it and definitely could taste butter. It was almost a 50/50 mix of it... I definitely don't want that in my beer. It looks like I'm gonna go with the second option then. I figure this way I have a few weeks to keep trying if I don't succeed to get a sour mash. I'll probably try to mash a gallon of pilsner malt in a cooler with the same original gravity as my beer, save some saison yeast from the starter to ferment it out in a separate container, and blend it when I'm finally done. Thanks brewinhard for your opinions! I'll definitely post up once I have the final product to let everyone know how it turned out.

I wanna try experimenting with kombucha and water kefir in making sour beers, both of those have the kinda sour I enjoy plus they're good for you too with all those probiotic and junk.

Update! I made a 1 gallon sour mash for blending after fermentation. Came out great, but after mixing different amounts of both beers I couldn't get a good blend that tasted right. I added 6 cans of the Oregon sour cherries and wha'ddya know, the beer got a sour character thanks to the tart juice from them that complimented the base beer perfect. It even re-fermented after adding the cherries. I let it sit for a month or so before bottling it up for 2 competitions. The first competition I didn't place, but got a 35 and 38 score on my sheets. The second competition I got 5th place for the Fruit Beer category, getting 2 36's on the sheets. Said the cherry didn't come out in the taste, only in aroma, but the base saison was great. I've since brewed a berliner weisse and have tried blending the two only to get mixed reviews... I don't think lactic acid is a good method for souring a saison, probably should leave it up to pedio and brett and let it age.