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Optimal Media for Lactobacillus Growth

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I have been meaning to run some experiments for Year of the Sour Mash to determine the optimal medium to grow Lactobacillus, but it seems I have been beaten to the punch! Sam over at Eureka Brewing recently published an excellent writeup on evaluating starter media to propagate Lactobacillus that is far more comprehensive than anything I would have been able to produce. Take a look and I will share my thoughts below.

What I want to share today are the results of an evaluation experiment I performed a couple of months ago to look for MRS media alternatives to propagate lactobacillus at home. MRS media is kind of the golden standard used to propagate lactobacillus. It works very well but with the disadvantage of being a quite expensive media. I therefore tested a couple of cheaper alternative media and compared the growth/propagation efficiency with MRS.

Source: Evaluate starter media to propagate Lactobacillus sp. | Eureka Brewing

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Berliner and Beyond

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I know I have been under a rock for the past month or so; I have been keeping my head down and focusing on my presentation Berliner and Beyond: Sour Mashing and its Applications which I presented this past week at the National Homebrewers Conference. NHC was an awesome time and I really feel like I nailed my presentation, but without further ado I wanted to be sure I get my slides up as a reference.

I will see if I can get a copy of the audio recording and post it up here or a dedicated page. In the mean time, please feel free to ask me any questions you might have about sour mashing!

Update: Grabbed the audio and threw the slides and audio up on a dedicated page.

Extra Bestest Boy – ESB

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Secret Puppies

Check out the rest of my recipes in the index.
I have been doing a bad job writing up recipes recently, I let a few get by me while I worked on my big sour mash and lacto starter posts. In an effort to not lose momentum by agonizing about things left behind lets just leave those write-ups for the re-brews.

Speaking of re-brews, I have mentioned before I am a big fan English style pale ales; it is one of the few styles I revisit frequently as I attempt to perfect my technique. While not the hop bombs that American ales tend to be, English ales are packed with malt and yeast character that make them supremely drinkable, even better that they tend to be very sessionable. In my mind a good English style ale is dependable, full of character, and always by your side–just like a certain four-legged companion!

In honor of my (not so) Miniature Long-Haired Dachshund–Professor Snugglesworth–I have named my English pale ales after him: Good Boy Bitter, Bestest Boy Special Bitter, and Extra Bestest Boy ESB. When they are on tap I certainly want to fetch them again and again!

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Lactobacillus Starter Guide

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Brewers make wort, yeast make beer.

Year of the Sour Mash

Part of the Year of the Sour Mash series.

If you have been homebrewing for even a short amount of time you have probably heard that statement. As much as we would like to think that we are in control, it is our microscopic little friends that determine the quality of our batch; brewers are little more than glorified yeast wranglers. Thus, when fellow homebrewers ask me what they can do to improve the quality of their beer the first thing I always tell them is: “make a yeast starter.” Proper amounts of healthy, happy yeast make delicious beer free from off-flavors; simple as that.

Time to let you in on a little secret: yeast are not the only things that make beer! Myriad organisms such as Brettanomyces, wild Saccharomyces, Pediococcus, and Lactobacillus will happily feast upon the wort you just created and leave you with beer (and those are just the organisms that produce favorable characteristics). Indeed, it is these organisms that folks interested in making sour or funky beers will harness to produce the character they are looking for. However, whether you are making a clean beer with “regular” yeast or a sour/funky beer with these other organisms, one thing remains the same: proper amounts of healthy, happy <insert organism(s) of choice> make delicious beer free from off-flavors. When folks tell me their sour mashes go bad I liken it to folks saying their regular beers went bad, only to find out they pitched a single vial of old yeast into 1.090 OG wort at 95ºF. A little bit of preparation practically guarantees a successful souring; whatever your organism of choice is, make a starter!

lactobacillus photo

lactobacillus – isis325

If you have been following along with Year of the Sour Mash you will know we are primarily interested in the fast, clean souring of Lactobacillus to sour our mash/wort. Whether you are pitching a pure culture of Lactobacillus or growing a wild culture from grains, I have created this Lactobacillus starter guide to help you propagate the quantities needed to ensure your beer sours cleanly.

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Fiesta Cumpleaños – Vienna Lager

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Fiesta Cumpleaños wide

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Anton Dreher

Anton Dreher

I have a curious attraction to Vienna Lagers, a style that all but disappeared off the face of the earth, save for a handful of breweries in Mexico. If you do not know the story, it goes a little something like this: in the early/mid 1800’s a fellow from Vienna by the name of Anton Dreher formalized the process we know today as lager brewing with a beer he called Märtzen. At the time the “pale” malts were significantly darker than they are today and produced a beer that was a coppery reddish-brown with a significant amount of toasty melanoidin character. Flash-forward to the late 1800’s and an Austrian immigrant to Mexico by the name of Santiago Graf (whom little is known, unfortunately) opened a brewery using the traditions he brought from home, with the addition of a small percentage of roasted malt to compensate for the alkaline water of the region. Thus, as Vienna-style lagers began to disappear in their homeland (favoring pale Pilsner style lagers), the style lived on in a handful of breweries in Mexico.

My own interest in Vienna Lagers is due to San Diego’s proximity to Mexico: we are too far from Europe to easily get any interesting European imports, so in the bad old days before craft beer took over there was only bland macro lagers or a handful of Mexican imports to choose from. If you were lucky, a restaurant or supermarket would have Negra Modelo available; a fine beer and just about the perfect pairing for Mexican food. To this day, if I go somewhere that has Negra Modelo on draught I will likely choose it 80% of the time. Now that San Diego is a craft beer mecca it has gotten harder and harder to find any Vienna-style lagers (or lagers in general), so I have decided to take matters into my own hands.

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