Why is homebrew sour

This creates mercaptan which is the same chemical that skunks spray when they are frightened. In commercial beers, you will usually find this flavor within clear or green bottles because they do not protect the beer from UV light.

Avoid this flavor by protecting your fermenter and bottled beer from light. Oxidization usually tastes stale or old or like wet cardboard or paper. But also, not aerating your wort before pitching can cause it too.

You can dodge this off flavor by avoiding excessive splashing or fermented beer and being careful when you do any kind of transfer. Also remember, warm liquid will always absorb oxygen far easier so lower the temp or your wort before being too rough with it. So, this is often described as vinegar or acrid. Except for in sours this flavor is out of lace in other styles and is usually a sign of bacterial infection or wild yeast infection.

When this happens, you will usually get a strong smell of vinegar as well. This becomes even more important the more you have used your equipment many times. Jul 11, Jrm Sour taste on my last bottled beers. Replies 8 Views Dec 30, jsaxon Is my beer ok?

Replies 2 Views Oct 12, hal Replies 15 Views 1K. Dec 1, beersydoesit. Is my beer OK?! Donrob Oct 27, Replies 7 Views Oct 28, BamaRooster. Latest posts. Harvesting wild yeast for pasteurized cider Latest: Falstaff 3 minutes ago. Cider Forum. Latest: z-bob 4 minutes ago. American Stout Rhinestone Carboy Latest: bagbrewer 11 minutes ago. Homebrew Ale Recipes. Removing plastic door shelves panel from Regular fridge door Latest: Falstaff 12 minutes ago. Electric Brewing. Love Golf? But there are many valid reasons why new homebrewers steer clear of making sour beer: homebrew shops often discourage it; the bacteria and wild yeast required for producing sour ales can contaminate homebrewing equipment and spoil other styles; and, perhaps most importantly, most people are under the impression that sour beers take at least a year from brewing to bottling to get a tasty outcome.

While the first two warnings are true—the risks are real and homebrew shops have a fondness for limiting new brewers to American pale ales— you don't actually need months to make a flawless, tasty sour beer.

Meet the "fast sour" beer, which takes as much time to make as any pale ale or porter. Popularized as a technique largely through the site Milk the Funk , fast-souring offers a revolution in homebrewing that makes stellar sour beer a practical reality to create in your kitchen—in just over a month.

The secret to the fast sour is maximizing the contribution of lactic acid-producing bacteria Lactobacillus and Pediococcus, primarily early in the brewing cycle. This makes it possible to "sour" your beer before it has much in the way of alcohol content, thereby ensuring you won't need to wait a year before the beer tastes sour enough.

My specific approach to fast-souring, more than anything else, is about taking steps to ensure that flaws that can ruin a sour beer don't appear in the final product. In the context of industrial beer production, pretty much everything about making sour beer is wrong.

Sour-friendly bacteria can ruin your average IPA or light lager. The wild yeasts used for sour beer can literally make bottles explode due to excessive carbonation. These are both justifiably regarded as contaminants.

The low alcohol content gives bacteria the best chance to convert as much of the sugar to lactic acid, as opposed to alcohol, as possible.

The simple flavor is the best you can hope for in such a rapid souring process and is easy to aim toward note: if looking for lambic-like complexity, you'll need a few years to get it right. The end product is light, tart, and delicious either on its own or blended with other beer styles to create unique concoctions. Sour beer is typically produced through mixed fermentation: either exposing wort to microbes from the air for a spontaneous fermentation or pitching brewer's yeast, brettanomyces , and bacteria together, and then waiting a long time to see what happens.

The fast sour approach is more about a careful set of consecutive and efficient fermentations. Rather than creating wort and seeing what results, this approach takes what we know from the brewing tradition and uses it to streamline the process. Each step advances the beer and sets up the next, maximizing efficiency while controlling for errors.

It would dismay any of the lambic blenders in Belgium, for which I apologize, but tradition is great when you've been making beer for centuries. It's an impediment when you're just getting started. When making sour beer, the most common traditional approach is either to ferment the beer first and then introduce bacteria for sourness after, or let natural microbes yeast and bacteria take hold and let them run their course. Outside of a handful of sour beer styles, most sour flavors are undesirable.

Sour flavors can come from several different places. These bugs can enter your wort or beer at just about any point in the brewing process after boiling, including during cooling, transfer or fermentation. The most common actual souring agent in beer is Lactic Acid, which gives a distinctive sour flavor.

Lactic acid is produced by Lactobacillus, which is a bacteria actually used in many sour Belgian beer styles. You can purchase Lactobacillus as a separate culture from major yeast suppliers if you want to produce sour flavored styles such as Flanders, and it is added to the secondary.

Lactobacillus is also used to create yogurt as well. Unfortunately it is also a common wild bacteria found just about everywhere — so if you are not careful with sanitation it can easily make its way into your wort or fermenting beer.

Another source of lactic acid sour in beer is Pediococcus, which is also a bacteria. Pediococcus, however, also produces a buttery flavor as a byproduct similar to those described in my article on diactyl.

So if you get a combination of sour and buttery flavor you likely have a Pedio infection. A final common bacteria is Acetobacter. Acetobacter produces acetic acid instead of lactic acid. Acetic acid is the major component in vinegar so it if you have a strong vinegar flavor in your beer it is very likely due to Acetobacter.

Interestingly, acetobacter requires both the bacterial infection to occur and also requires oxygen to grow. So in addition to having poor sanitation, you would need to have oxygen present in the beer, either by infecting the wort before fermentation has taken place or by aerating the beer during fermentation or transfer.

So if you get a vinegar tasting beer, you need to check both your sanitation procedures and also be careful not to add air to your beer once fermentation has started.