German Brewing

Since I have been getting tons of questions from folks, here is what I think any easy way to at least approach the subject(all guesses though). Formulate your next batch to give you 2 extra liters. Take those 2 liters(mason jars, flask) at add some malt( 4oz, 8oz??) and find a place to store them at 48c for 3-5 days. After than you can then most likely chill them in the fridge until next brew. Just make sure to account for the amount of cold liquid you will be dumping in. You could theoretically do this for every batch, and use SG that way.

That's exactly what I do for my yeast starters

Yup.

Just look at it as two starters

Making liquid bread isn't just a romantic platitude. It's the mindset and approach.

The bakers amongst us will recognise this as not too dissimilar from making sourdough bread.

And there you have it. Our beers are the sourdoughs in the beer world.

Simple

Indeed!

Thanks for showing your slow cooker setup Bilsch! Taking inspiration from your idea (and having read Bryan's & Tech's threads - thanks!), I decided to do my own attempt. Whilst I'm sorting my lager ferments out, I thought it would be good to bank some Saurgut up. At least I can do some Hefe's !

Super simple setup. Cheap slow cooker, temp probe into water bath (with foil to insulate the wire where the ceramic pot heats up), lid with foil at add a little insulation. Here it is with 1.5 liters in preserving jars (lids loose). Temp at 40C, heating up.



Here it is with lid fitted. Holding 47C. Temp is set for 46C. It fluctuates between 45 - 48C.



Like others, I simply did a mini mash on the stove.

-270g of pils malt, held at 149F for 1 hour. Then 170 for 15 mins.
-Let cool in water bath in sink, and gently decanted.
-Yielded 1.5 liters @ 11 plato.
-Lowered PH to 4.5 with food grade phosphoric acid (ok, sacrilege, I know) as best was possible with PH strips.
-inoculated with some crushed malt.

Will hold it for 3 days and see how it goes

Ah.. the old ghetto sg reactor.
Your welcome and good luck with your product.

Seems to be the general consensus that a continuously operating reactor/ferment produces a better quality product. However when using this small batch model.. could one use a small quantity of a previous batch to inoculate the new batch? Could this maybe improve the quality over using grain for the lacto source? Just a thought.

Exactly what I was thinking. That said, I also was going to suggest a SG COOP where we could kick funds in to source some authentic stuff and then someone could volunteer to build it up and ship "mothers" that we could grow up on our own.