German Brewing

Mostly because of boredom this weekend I decided to make sauergut to test out as a more flavorful replacement for acid malt or mineral acids in my weissbier recipes.
I made a small mash: 454 crushed pale malt, 28 g acid malt in 3l water @ 65c held for an hour, strained, boiled, cooled to 48c. I then put the wort into a 1 gal glass jar and inoculated with ~30 grams crushed Heidelberg malt, flushed with CO2 and capped. A standard crockpot connected to a Ranco controller made a decent water bath to maintain temp. A ghetto reflectix dog cone kept the heat contained. Temp was maintained at 48c for 2 hours the reduced to 46c for a further 22 hours then down to 38c for a final 24 hours. Final product pH was 3.3 with, as expected, very sharp but pleasant lactic bite with no detectable off flavors. So far I’m fairly pleased with the simplicity of the project. Now to wait for a suitable brewday to give it the acid test as it were.

Are you going to do a side by side test to see if it has a noticable affect vs Acid malt/Lactic?

That would be best of course but I'm not really setup do to split batches. So my subjective observations will have to come from doing subsequent batches. This first time was more to explore the complexity of the acid manufacturing process anyway. And that, I now know, is quite easy to do. Not nearly as complicated as malting barley and wheat, which I also do regularly.

Looks good

Cheers! I love to see stuff like this. Perhaps we will declassify our procedure now as well.

Bryan

I did this a while back, my pH ended up in the same range. Do you have something like a wine acid titration kit to estimate the percentage of acid? I'd be curious to see where yours ended up, mine was around 1% acid by volume, iirc.

I have a burette and can cobble together something with a stir plate and my pH meter. The plan originally was to make a congress mash and try hitting the proper mash pH, and look at the volumes required to see if it was an unreasonably high amount.

Bryan.. it was my hope, since joining all of a few days ago, that I could eventually coax you into sharing some of your “it” secrets by demonstrating my worthiness in the experience gained from chasing it for some 30 years. Actually I have been reading posts from the members on other forums for a while and that is how I tracked this place down. I my thought after reading a while, “I am home”.

It has been declassified, and placed as an announcement at the top of the ingredients forum.

In an effort to refine and simplify my sauergut production and storage technique, another batch was begun. One pound of common 2-row malt and 30g acid malt was mashed in with 3.5 liter. The increase in water from the first batch is to lower the gravity and see if the same terminal pH of 3.3 can be reached with a thinner wort, thus exploring what the limiting factor is. This was then held @ 65c for 90 min. The entirety was then brought to boil for 10 min or until beginnings of a hot break was noticed. The grain was filtered out taking along with it some of the formed insoluble protein. The filtrate was again brought to a boil and held for about 30 minutes then allowed to cool until reaching ~50c. At that time, 30 grams of whole malt this time, for inoculation, was added. I idea being to facilitate it’s separation with a minimum of handing and exposure to unintended microorganisms as well as to reduce starchy grain sediment in the final product.

Complexity of the process was further reduced by eliminating the larger souring container and going directly into the same mason jars that the final product will be stored. About 3 one quart containers of wort were produce and the headspace was flushed with CO2 before sealing the bands on the jars. On the last run, I check vented the 1 gallon jar repeatedly but no pressure was noticed to build up during the souring so I’m not worried about fully sealing these. Besides, this type of canning jar cap is designed to vent off higher pressures.