A Great Review on Sour Beer Bugs

Mat "Dr. Lambic" Miller, author of the Sour Beer Blog, just posted one of the best and most comprehensive reviews of brewing organisms used in sour beer production, as well as the myriad of ways that they can be applied to the production of sour &/or funky beers.

Whether new to the sour scene, or an old hand, its a post worth reading.

Michael Tonsmeire Drops Some Knowledge

My favourite home-brew channel (Chop & Brew) just posted a video of sour beer guru Michael Tonsmeire discussing the brewing of sour beers. He starts off with the basics (advice to follow if brewing your first beer), but goes into some of the finer details later in the video. So grab your headphones, a homebrew, and retreat to a quiet corner of your home and let the knowledge flow through you...

 

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Edit:

Want the Cole's notes version of the details? Here's two handy tables:

Controlling Funk:

Maximize	Minimize
Add wheat malt	Avoid wheat malt
Perform a ferulic acid rest (42C/1208F for 15-30 minutes)	Avoid low-temperature rests; go straight to Saccharification
Primary ferment with a spicy strain (Belgian, hefeweizen)	Primary ferment with a clean yeast
Use a phenolic Brett (B. lambicus, B. bruxellensis)	No Brett, or a mild brett (B. claussenii)
Sour beer in primary fermenter (autolysis = phenols)	Rack to secondary after fermentation. Optional:  cold crashing/fining/filtering
Bottle condition	Force carbonate

Controlling Acidity:

Maximize	Minimize
High saccharification temperature (158-160F, 70-71C)	Low saccharification temperature (146-148F/63-34C)
Use less attenuative brewers yeast	Pitch highly attenuative brewers yeast
Sour with L. brevis and Pwediococcus	Use Wyeast/White Labs L. delbrueckii, or L. buchneri for souring

A Post Worth Reading

I don't often promote other bloggers posts - which is something I need to fix - so to get that ball rolling I'd like to link everyone to this blog post over at Ben's Beer Blog: Labatt is planning an expensive, intentionally misleading ad campaign for Shock Top.

The blog post is essentially a break-down of Labatt's (a subsidiary of In-Bev, which also owns Budweiser) strategy to mislead customers into thinking some of Labatts products are craft beers. It highlights some of the underhanded methods used by "big beer" to squash their craft brewer competition (that's the bad news). The good news is that it also shows just how damaging craft brewing is becoming to the big guys.