Lactobacillus Helveticus Beer: Experimenting With Sourness
When it comes to sour beer, many people jump right to Brettanomyces, thinking this is the only way, or the best way, to bring down the pH. However, Lactobacillus helveticus is not only an excellent alternative. It may also be a superior one.
What Is Lactobacillus Helveticus?
Lactobacillus helveticus is a strand of lactic acid bacteria that naturally occurs in the gut. Most commonly, we associate L. helveticus with good gut health.
In the gut health world, we talk about prebiotics and probiotics.
Probiotics are the bacteria that exist in a healthy gut and prebiotics are essentially the food those bacteria eat. Prebiotics are typically plants rich in nutrients, like salad greens.
Humans need both in our diets.
To achieve and maintain good gut health, we often take probiotics or eat foods rich in probiotics. You can take supplements, have a diet rich in probiotics, or both. Examples of probiotic foods are sauerkraut, yogurt with live and active cultures, pickles, olives, buttermilk, and some cheeses.
There are tremendous benefits to consuming L. helveticus, including promoting gut health, decreasing blood pressure, and increasing calcium levels, all of which have their own benefits, like improving sleep, memory, and anxiety and depression.
All of this news is great for brewers and beer drinkers interested in working with L. helveticus to make beer sour.
What Makes Sour Beer Sour?
There is much debate over how best to make a beer sour, but the bottom line is that to make beer sour, you need to lower the pH. A few ways exist to lower the pH of beer, making it more acidic.
As a quick refresher, remember that pH is a chemistry measuring tool for how acidic a liquid is. We use a scale that runs from 0 to 14, which 0 being highly acidic, 7 being neutral, and 14 being highly alkaline, which is the opposite of acidic.
Pure water is a 7, or neutral, and beer is acidic, usually hovering around 4.5.
Beer at a pH of 4.5 does not typically taste sour, however. To get sour beer, we need to bring that pH down even lower.
To accomplish this lowering, brewers will add elements outside of the usual brewer’s yeast, grain, and hops.
Historically, beer was always a bit sour because bacteria managed to find its way into the fermentation vessel and lower the pH. In regions of Belgium, a wild strain of yeast called Brettanomyces lambicus, shortened by many to “Brett,” has been included to make a Lambic ale, which is slightly sour and a delicacy of sorts in that area.
Today, more and more brewers are waking up to the reality that we can use L. helveticus to get a similar job done in a fraction of the time.
How Does Lactobacillus Helveticus Affect Beer?
L. helveticus, when added to fermentation, will dramatically lower the pH of your beer in a single day.
The bacteria work alongside the yeast during the brewing process to further break down the sugars in the wort. While the yeast will convert those sugars to alcohol and carbon dioxide, the bacteria will convert those sugars to lactic acid.
Because of the competition between yeast and bacteria, you may even get a more efficient mash, extracting more sugar from the grain than you would with yeast alone.
Lactobacillus Brewing
Several methods exist for brewing with L. helveticus and there are benefits to all.
Many brewers today, both at home and in breweries, are following a process called kettle brewing, during which L. helveticus is added to the kettle during the boil, before fermentation. Kettle brewing allows the pH to drop quickly, within a matter of hours.
However, some brewers argue that souring beer that fast only delivers a single note of sourness, with little complexity.
For more complexity, brewers will add fruit to the beer after fermentation and allow the L. helveticus already on the skins of the fruit to slowly sour the beer over time.
Others will place the fermented beer in a barrel that has previously aged a sour beer, and allow the bacteria still in the barrel to sour the newly placed beer over time.
Summing It All Up
In the end, it will be up to the brewer to decide how best to create the sour beer for your brewery. Whether you use Brettanomyces or Lactobacillus, and whether you decide to work with kettle brewing or age the beer, it will all come down to your preference for sourness, fruity flavors, and complexity as well as how quickly you hope to get the job done.
You might want to start with kettle brewing as it is quick and easy, just so you have a base to start from, and then you can work your way up to fruit aging, barrel aging, or even spontaneous fermenting – allowing the naturally occurring bacteria to sour your beer for you in an open vessel like our ancestors have done for millennia.
The sky is really the limit when it comes to brewing sour beer. You can work your way up and down the scale of sourness and build in various stages of complexity. Remember, you are on a journey to master this craft. And that journey is all about experimentation.
Cheers!
Are you still pitching fresh yeast every time? By reusing your yeast, you can save up to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on just yeast alone!
Join the hundreds of brewers from all around the world using the Smartest Automated Yeast Cell Counter! Request a Free Demo Account today and experience firsthand how Oculyze can take your brewery to the next level!
Sources:
- https://byo.com/article/brewing-with-lactobacillus/
- https://www.healthline.com/health/lactobacillus-helveticus
Stay on top on important fermentation insights – subscribe to our monthly newsletter and receive a hand-picked selection of our most relevant articles straight to your inbox.
Never miss a beat and get real time updates with a new article each workday by subscribing our social media channels.
Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube
