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posted by CoolHand on Sunday August 30 2015, @03:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the drinking-on-the-job dept.

A little Lactobacillus for the weekend? NPR has an article about the increasing use of kettle souring by breweries:

If you're tuned into the world of beer, you may be aware of sour beers — a loosely defined style that has been made for centuries but is gaining fresh appreciation in today's craft beer renaissance. Brewers make these beers by deliberately adding bacteria and, sometimes, wild yeast to the brew, then letting them age slowly. It sounds weird, but sours can be delicious — tart and earthy, and redolent of things like leather, fruit and wood.

They're also very hard to make, requiring months or years of letting the beer gradually mature in the cellar. And all the while, brewers must take extra precautions to prevent the souring microbes from bursting out and contaminating the rest of their nonsour beers — a major logistical hitch and expense. That's why some brewers refuse to make sours: They're too much trouble. And those who do make them sell the beers at high prices, often $5 or $6 for a dainty 6-ounce sample. But a technique that makes brewing sour beers fast and easy is trending across America — making sours much more affordable. The technique is called kettle souring, and it allows brewers to produce a mouth-puckering sour in about the same time it takes to make any other beer. The result can be generous pours of acidic, face-twistingly refreshing beer for the standard price of a pint.

[...] Kettle-soured beers use some of the same critters as traditional sours to achieve a crisp, sharp tang: bacteria of the Lactobacillus genus, which munch on the sugars in beer and convert them into acids, while also turning out flavors and aromas. Some brewers will even use a dollop of yogurt made with Lactobacillus cultures to kettle sour their beers. (Traditional sours often also use Pediococcus bacteria and Brettanomyces yeast, but right now, most brewers who use kettle souring rely on Lactobacillus.)

But the key reason kettle-soured beers can be made cheaper is a change in the usual order of operations. With traditional souring, the microbes are added after the beer has fermented. That means hop oils and alcohol are already present in the beer. But hops can hinder bacteria, and alcohol slows down yeast. That's one main reason why the traditional souring process can take a long, long time — and part of the reason sour beers are intentionally made with few or no hops.

By contrast, with kettle souring, the microbes are added before the beer is fermented, so they can do their job quickly — literally, overnight in some cases, according to Lance Shaner, co-owner of Omega Yeast Labs, a company in Chicago that sells liquid Lactobacillus culture. Even when the souring takes several days, it's still lightning fast compared with barrel souring. Once the beer hits the desired level of acidity, it is then boiled to kill the souring agent. That eliminates the need for added safeguards — like a whole separate set of brewing equipment — to keep the microbes from escaping and unintentionally fouling other beers in the same brewery. The kettle-soured beer is then fermented and hopped, as usual. All in all, kettle souring means less cost, and less time. "So you're only adding an extra day to the production time," says Ben Love, the brewer at Gigantic Brewing.

[...] Jeff Grant, the owner and brewer at Draught Works, is also a fan of making kettle-soured beer, but he doesn't make them as stand-alone brews. Rather, Grant has been using his kettle-soured beer as an acidic blending ingredient to add to other beers. Edmunds, at Breakside Brewery, uses the same technique — much the way winemakers combine different wines to create a final product. "[Kettle souring] is an awesome tool for brewers to keep in their back pocket to add acidity to a beer," Edmunds says. He adds that kettle souring makes a unique and very simple style of its own — but it doesn't compare to traditional sour styles, like lambics and Flanders red ales. In fact, Edmunds says he is a little worried that brewers might try to use kettle souring to produce fast and simplified renditions of these slow-soured styles. "I really hope that brewers who embrace kettle souring see that it's not just a replacement for all those other aging processes that take more time, and which took hundreds of years to develop."


Original Submission

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Mexican Craft Beer Coming to the U.S. 45 comments

Mexican craft beer: Coming from south of the border for your taste buds

While overall U.S. beer industry sales remain flat, Americans' thirst for craft beer continues to grow and Mexican beers such as Corona Extra and Modelo Especial have unquenched market appeal. Could craft beer made by Mexican brewmasters be the next big beverage trend in the U.S.? A trio of former Anheuser-Busch executives and a Mexican entrepreneur are betting on it with a new venture, Quest Beverage. The company has already introduced four beers into Houston and St. Louis and throughout Missouri, and the beers are now hitting markets in California, Illinois and Texas.

The beers currently being imported are a citrusy Crossover IPA and crisp Blonde Ale from Cerveza Urbana, based in Mexicali, Mexico, and a light, dry Kölsch ale and a malty, mildly bitter London-style ale from Monterrey, Mexico's Cerveza Rrëy.

A trio of trends points to potential success:

• A growing Hispanic population in the U.S. now makes up 18 percent of Americans.

• Mexican imports are hot. Corona Extra and Modelo Especial each owned 5 percent of the retail market last year, according to IRI, a Chicago-based market research firm. Modelo Especial sales rose 18 percent, dollar-wise, from 2017.

• Growth in craft beer, brewed by small, independent breweries, has slowed, but its share of the overall $111 billion-plus U.S. beer industry is expected to increase beyond the 23.4 percent it captured in 2017, according to the Brewers Association.

Related: Congress May Lower Beer Taxes, Sam Adams Could Cease to be "Craft Beer"
Kettle Souring Makes Sour Beers on the Cheap
Playing Small is Okay, Says Judge in "Craft Beer" Case
Asahi Buys SABMiller's Eastern European Beers for $7.8 Billion
Kelp in Craft Beer


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @03:58AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @03:58AM (#229687)

    Corporations demand the immediate reenactment of Prohibition until such time as cheap sour beer ceases to threaten the profits to which corporations are entitled.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by epitaxial on Sunday August 30 2015, @04:17AM

    by epitaxial (3165) on Sunday August 30 2015, @04:17AM (#229690)

    Anything to break the trend of bitter for the sake of bitter. I could brew an IPA with added lye and people would rave about it.

    • (Score: 1) by Post-Nihilist on Sunday August 30 2015, @04:33AM

      by Post-Nihilist (5672) on Sunday August 30 2015, @04:33AM (#229693)

      Lye is not bitter, it burns right through your taste buds. Try denatonium benzoate, 10ppm is unbearably bitter.

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      • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @04:47AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @04:47AM (#229696)

        Taste buds are for wimps.

    • (Score: 2) by Sir Finkus on Sunday August 30 2015, @05:42AM

      by Sir Finkus (192) on Sunday August 30 2015, @05:42AM (#229709) Journal

      I love bitter beers, but I've recently moved on to sours. I wish I knew more about them so I could make a more interesting comment about them. My favorite so far of the 3 I've tried has been Sour Sunrise http://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/31780/157550/. [beeradvocate.com]

      I do understand the "bitterness" towards the IPA craft brewing trends as a stout drinker. It's a little annoying to go to a restaurant or a brewery that has 3-4 IPAs, and only a token porter or stout.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by theluggage on Sunday August 30 2015, @01:11PM

        by theluggage (1797) on Sunday August 30 2015, @01:11PM (#229814)

        It's a little annoying to go to a restaurant or a brewery that has 3-4 IPAs, and only a token porter or stout.

        Actually, I'm always grateful to find myself in a restaurant that has 4-5 decent beers of any type on tap. In the past, its often been 'choose from our range of 100 different types of spoiled grape juice - or enjoy a cool bottle of<insert name of TV-advertised frosty piss here>.

        Nothing wrong with a nice IPA, but it does seem to be a victim of the zero'th amendment to the US constitution ('if some is good, more is better') at the moment, and that's even affecting beer here in Blightey (where US-style pale ales are also trending).

        • (Score: 2) by M. Baranczak on Sunday August 30 2015, @01:49PM

          by M. Baranczak (1673) on Sunday August 30 2015, @01:49PM (#229830)
          Most American IPAs are undrinkable, but some manage to achieve a good balance. I'm partial to the one from Southern Tier Brewing. On the off-chance that it's ever exported to the UK, give it a try.
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @03:06PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @03:06PM (#229850)

            The über-hoppy trend has peaked. The trend is now towards more "session" IPAs but highlighting the new and interesting flavor hops that are out there.

      • (Score: 2, Interesting) by OwMyBrain on Monday August 31 2015, @02:52PM

        by OwMyBrain (5044) on Monday August 31 2015, @02:52PM (#230193)

        "I do understand the "bitterness" towards the IPA craft brewing trends as a stout drinker. It's a little annoying to go to a restaurant or a brewery that has 3-4 IPAs, and only a token porter or stout."

        I LOVE IPAs and even I'm annoyed by how much they dominate the craft beer scene. Even though I like IPAs, I also enjoy many other styles of beer, and many of my friends don't like IPA's. Because of that, if I'm buying for a group/party, IPA is way down on the list. Oh well.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @04:31AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @04:31AM (#229692)

    ...who had a bad Lactobacillus infection, allow me to be the first to say "No Thanks!!!.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Sunday August 30 2015, @04:55AM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday August 30 2015, @04:55AM (#229697) Journal

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactobacillus [wikipedia.org]

      Lactobacillus is a type of bacteria with multiple different species in the genus. Most Lactobacillus species in humans are considered harmless. Lactobacilli live in the urinary, digestive and genital tracks of humans.

      It's too late, you're filled with trillions of bacteria [scientificamerican.com].

      All the bacteria living inside you would fill a half-gallon jug; there are 10 times more bacterial cells in your body than human cells, according to Carolyn Bohach, a microbiologist at the University of Idaho (U.I.), along with other estimates from scientific studies.

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      • (Score: 2) by mrchew1982 on Monday August 31 2015, @01:46AM

        by mrchew1982 (3565) on Monday August 31 2015, @01:46AM (#230010)

        As one professor put it, there's more bacteria IN you and ON you, than there is you...

        However, even though bacteria can be beneficial to your body in certain locales, they can be harmful in others. For example, Escheria coli. Lives in your lower digestive track, really bad if it gets ingested in quantity, and more so if it's from someone else. Getting bacteria growing in your blood can be especially bad, even though it doesn't happen often, it can.

        http://m.cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/38/1/62.full [oxfordjournals.org]

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @02:58PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @02:58PM (#229847)

      That's why you sour in the kettle. You then boil it and not have to worry about infection.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @04:46AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @04:46AM (#229695)

    A couple of weeks ago we went across town to our local Trader Joes, looking for a favorite beer...but they were out of stock. Instead I picked a slightly more expensive ($11) six-pack of a craft wheat beer that looked interesting.

    Got home and we tried one -- it was weird, several different tastes hit one after the other and the final was very sour. Having no idea what was going on, I just returned the remaining 5 bottles this morning.

    Now I know that it was meant to be sour, thanks takyon! It's nice to read a little about the process but that doesn't change my initial opinion...not going to try that again anytime soon. Some years back I tried an expensive lambic ale, didn't like that either.

    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday August 30 2015, @04:56AM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday August 30 2015, @04:56AM (#229698) Journal
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      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @05:12PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @05:12PM (#229892)

        Nope, a little searching turned it up,
              http://ithacabeer.com/beers/cayuga-cruiser/ [ithacabeer.com]

        Cayuga Cruiser is our slightly tart and exceptionally refreshing Berliner-Weisse style ale. Mildly hazy in appearance and light in body, this beer delivers the perfect combination of elements resulting in supreme and satisfying drinkability. Whether you’re on a boat or in your backyard, this beer is the quintessential summer refresher.
        Availability Summer
        ABV 4.2%
        Malt: 2-Row Pale, Pilsner, Wheat
        Hops: Lublin, Syubilla
        Yeast: House, Lactobacillus

        Sure enough, there's the *sour*, from Lactobacillus.

    • (Score: 2) by M. Baranczak on Sunday August 30 2015, @05:28AM

      by M. Baranczak (1673) on Sunday August 30 2015, @05:28AM (#229707)
      The last sour beer I tried tasted like lemonade that someone forgot to put sugar in, which then went bad. It's not a trend I want to encourage.
      • (Score: 2) by fritsd on Sunday August 30 2015, @07:32AM

        by fritsd (4586) on Sunday August 30 2015, @07:32AM (#229737) Journal

        The last sour beer I tried tasted like lemonade that someone forgot to put sugar in, which then went bad. It's not a trend I want to encourage.

        I suspect that's how Kriek Lambiek [wikipedia.org] was invented ... ;-)

        My grandparents had a sour cherry tree: it was small (2-3 meters), and yielded abundent large pale-orange juicy cherries. If you put more than 2 in your mouth, your eyes would water and your mouth would pucker, they were *that* sour (when ripe!)

        A very different fruit from the similar-looking cherries.