BeerBorg

Just finished bottling a 5 gal batch of coopers australian pale ale.

Took a day off of work so I think I'll brew. I have a bottle of ECY Bug County 20 for a Tart of Darkness clone.
I also have Frankin Yeast, a huge starter of sacc and bugs built up from dregs of 8-10 sour beers. I have no clue what it will make and will never be able to replicate it again because I can't remember what beers I used. I'll find out in about a year so stay tuned.

Here is some of what I'll be pitching.



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Well just tasted the Frankin Yeast beer, good thing too. It has a acetobacter infection. I won't be pitching that into anything.
Anyone know how to make malt vinegar?
Off to brew ToD.

Inkleg wrote:Well just tasted the Frankin Yeast beer, good thing too. It has a acetobacter infection. I won't be pitching that into anything.
Anyone know how to make malt vinegar?
Off to brew ToD.

Good thing you gave it a taste. To invest a year or so into a brew and find you need to dump would suck.

Inkleg wrote:Anyone know how to make malt vinegar?

Brew up a small batch of wort with no hops. Ferment it with some mellow sacc. strain. Then once it's fermented pitch you acetobacter culture, and let it the acetobacter go at it without an airlock (just cover with cheese cloth or foil) in a vessel with a large amount of headspace so there is lots of oxygen available.

If it's really acetobacter you should get a mother ( a pellicle that is solid enough to actually manipulate with your hands without it falling apart - it has cellulose in it ). It will be on top while it's converting your alcohol to vinegar. It should sink when it's run out of stuff to eat. You can save the mother and use it over and over again.

Hard to say what any of the other bugs in there will do, BUT if you ferment the wort with a pure sacc strain first, then they likely won't get much of a foothold and the acetobacter will lower the PH to toxic levels quickly as it chews up the alcohol.

If you start with a high gravity wort then you can dilute the results and end up with more vinegar. But you have to be careful as with a high gravity wort you can end up with a strong enough acid content to blister your mouth if undiluted. So PH strips would be useful. Dilute it to 5 or so.

FWIW, your pellicle in the pic above doesn't look like an acetobacter pellicle. That looks like brett/lacto. Acetobacter makes a smooth translucent disk/blob. That doesn't mean there isn't any acetobacter in there of course. Only way to know (without a microscope) would be to do as above and see if you get that instead of the other funk. If there is acetobacter in there and you put it into beer with a moderate alcohol content and let oxygen get in, it should demolish anything else in there due to PH tolerances.

The picture above is not the wort I was tasting. That's in a bottle of Tart of Darkness that I tossed some wort on the bottle dregs.

The one I tasted was from 6-7 different bottle dregs that I had saved for many months before finally getting around to doing something with it. I just tossed some wort into it any time I made a starter, would cold crash and repeat. After the 3rd sip today I had enough and couldn't take any more and I like Sours. Other than tossing in fresh wort and allowing to ferment, it sits in a fridge. It has no mother. How long before one would form? I have some fresh wort and would like to experiment. Should I decant, pour in fresh wort and allow it to stay at room temperature for months? All I have are strips, but I'll try for a PH reading.

You really want to ferment out that fresh wort with a pure sacc strain first. So next time you make a starter for anything, take some fresh wort and give it a little bit of that starter, and let it ferments out. (or use a little bit of some dry yeast).

THEN add the nasty stuff.

That should allow the acetobacter (if it's in there) to outcompete everything else because acetobacter likes the alcohol (it eats it) and ph of fermented wort, and other stuff not as much. And once the aceotbacter gets going, the ph levels and acetic acid it makes will wipe out anything else. And it is important NOT to airlock it. Just put a loose piece of foil over the top, or some cheese cloth with a rubberband.

If that doesn't work, then is possible that what you are tasting is pediococcus, as it makes a "harsher" sour, and lots of other funky tasting stuff, where lactobacillus is a clean lemony sour. Pedio sour is more intense then Brett or Lacto. But it hates oxygen, so even if it is in there if there is any acetobacter, following the above should help bring the acetobacter up as the "winner". There might very well be some Pedio in the dregs of some Belgian Brett beers. Brett can eat/clean up some pedio byproducts, so they tend to balance one another out, but it's possible it got a better foothold in your frankensour. Do you have an airlock on it when it's sitting idle? An airlock will make pedio happy, but lacto not as happy, so it would let pedio get a bigger foothold. An airlock would suppress acetobacter, so you would not get a mother to form even if it's in there.

It is possible that you will make a nasty/funky vinegar the first time depending on what other bugs are in there, but if you do end up with a mother, then you could do it again using the actual mother and likely end up with good vinegar.

It might take 6-8 weeks to see a mother form. It likes it better in the dark then in the light. It needs oxygen. No oxygen = no mother.

You will know the mother from anything else. When you get a good one, you literally can pick it up and it won't fall apart, or throw it at your enemies to freak them out.

Probably a 6-8% beer base once fermented out would work best and get your mother to form quickly and give it enough alcohol to kick the butt of the other bugs. You can go up to 10-12%. Anything higher then that and you might suppress the acetobacter. 8% is about where lacto will stop being happy for sure. So if you want to suppress pretty much everything but the Brett and the Acetobacter, 8-10% is a good place to be. Oxygen is toxic to pedio, so letting oxygen in should help suppress it.

You don't need to worry about mold as acetic acid is toxic to it. If you see mold form with oxygen exposure, then there is no acetobacter in there. (it is not really fond of alcohol or lactic acid either, they suppress it, so it is unlikely to form, but acetic acid is just plain bad for it).

That about completes my knowledge of what likes what and hates other things, so I hope it's enough to point you in the right direction. You might get a bretty or funky vinegar the first time, but if you take that mother and use it to make more, it will probably come out clean.

I brewed an American Pale Ale, an 1G extract recipe from Craft-a-Brew using one lb of Breiss Golden Light DME along with steeping grains, Perle hops for bitterness and Cascade hops for aroma. I used a muslin bag for the steeping grains and also a smaller one for the hops, using the bag for the hops made for much less mess left behind in the wort so I was able to pour more of it into my fermentor.

Bottled 5 gallons of Rotund Tyre, a clone of Fat Tire.

When I was brewing the American Pale Ale Saturday, the bittering hops made the whole house smell wonderful! The wife probably wouldn't have minded but it was mostly gone by the time she got home Sat. evening.

We killed off a keg of Stupid Easy Cider yesterday. And as if I had planned it, I have 5 gal of a Scottish Ale ready to refill that empty keg tonight!

Yay me! PPP

Proper
Pipeline
Planning

brewnewb wrote: Yay me! PPP

Proper
Pipeline
Planning

That means you are no longer a BrewNewb. Congrats!

Kegged the RIS on Sunday, tapped the Scotch 80 tonight.

Brewing a Southern Brown Ale this morning. Perfect weather to brew outside. No wind, mid 60s, and sunny!