Fast sour timelines for production schedule

[brain medicine]

hey all-

so im looking to do a sour berliner weisse and assuming it goes over well with the public, keep it in our regular lineup. the issue is that i dont know anybody who's doing sours on a fast timeframe who i can get advice from before we start. ive done a few sours at home back in the day, with 3-6 months from grain to glass. but from the research i've seen here and other commercial brew info sites about doing sour mash or sour kettle, it seems as though souring times, especially berliner weisse, are in the range of 1-3 days

my experience at home was always that lacto took a ridiculously long time to get going. lag phase of like a week just to get the first sour notes. i'd like to sour in the kettle, and i can fit in a 2-3 day lockup of my brewhouse if i plan ahead, but a week is just too long to be standing still. but everyone here seems to say 24-36 hours for sour kettle to get in the 3.6ish range.

so....are folks making giant starters of lacto cultures? doubling the pitch size on the order from wyeast/white labs/etc.? im just trying to wrap my head around how to minimize the time our brewhouse is tied up in souring, without adding dedicated souring tanks or putting sour into our cold side. maybe there's new lacto strains in use since i last made my sour homebrew, im just having a bit of trouble wrapping my head around the speed i remember vs the speed folks are getting now.

thanks

[Crosley]

There's a bunch of folks that know this better than me, I did a Weiss a few months ago. Took roughly 3 days to get down to 2.8. I added roughly 5 lbs of unmalted wheat for the lactose. Turned out great.

[Junkyard]

you can add grain for your lacto or you can grow up a single strain from some smack packs. I usually buy about 4 smack packs of brevis or buchnerii and do two or three steps of 1000 ml starters. let each step go several days. We brew on a 3bbl sytem and I usually get significant activity within 8 hours. I usually sour Friday to monday or Tuesday. The bacteria really gets going when you pitch it at 115 degrees, at 70 degrees when you are growing it up the growth is about 4 times slower than 90-115 degrees if I remember right.

Ive heard you shouldn't sour below 3.6 if you want your yeast to attenuate, but ive found this isn't as big of a deal as I thought. The yeast definitely struggles a bit under very sour conditions, but if you pitch double the rate you should get a very healthy ferment. my latest sour was a Gose, and it soured down to 3.39, our American ale strain was able to take it down to 1.010, just like my last Berliner weisse which was a ph-3.6

[tjc27]

One thing to keep in mind if you use grain is that you need to purge the oxygen to prevent isovaleric and butyric acid (smelly feet and puke aromas). You can do this by pre-boiling the wort and then inoculating once it cools below 115F or run c02 through an oxygen stone to purge out the air. From there we do what Junkyard said. If you want to keep this going you can keep a culture on hand in a corny and inject it in the kettle then when you get the sourness you want run it back into the corny and you have an inoculant for the next batch.

[jhicks12]

One method I have heard is taking a fermenter and hooking the glycol lines to a hot water tank on a timer. That allows you to pitch lacto keep tank warm and not tie up the kettle while batch sours. If you are looking to make it a mainstay this would be something to look into if you have a extra fermenter to spare.

[brain medicine]

Souring over weekend is a great idea, hadn't thought of that. So it sounds like folks are happy with both cultured and natural lacto pitches.

Does anybody know if there is published data for cell counts? I assume the first batch I get from white labs should be sufficient to pitch into 15bbl batch. But even if I pull a corny's worth of inoculated wort out for next brew, that seems like it'd be too small of a cell count for 15bbl. (~1/3gal inooculant : 1bbl wort) Maybe a 1/2bbl sankey sounds better? (1gal of inoculant : 1bbl of wort?)

If any culture users have seen a cell count guideline or even numbers that work for them they can share that'd be great. Or for any natural lacto fans, how many lbs of malt (2row?, pils?) are they steeping per bbl of wort?

[beermkr]

I am listening to my Gose bubble away and was VERY happy with the way it worked out. 5bbl batch. Mashed in on Thursday morning and ran it of to the kettle. Brought it to 180 and cooled it to 115. put a bag with 10# of milled brewers malt in the kettle and flooded the kettle with co2. left it that way until monday morning.

3.28ph. nice sour taste. We refreshed the co2 blanket each day for about 30 minutes at 1.5psi.