Kentucky Common

[dmtaylor]

Yep, works for me.

[AdamWiz]

Thanks all who replied. I still have a lot to learn, and it was a good thing I learned about the corn now. I was about to add some flaked corn to the steeping grain on an extract cream ale. But I still have yet to hear from anyone who has tasted or brewed an example of a Kentucky Common. Anyone?

[dmtaylor]

I have. I brewed Mike Dixon's recipe, and I liked it very much. You can probably google it.

[mylifeoncraft]

I've tasted two - the first by New Albanian Brewing while I was at Great Taste of the Midwest and the second while judging
Specialty beers at a homebrew comp. It's been a few years but I remember digging them. I haven't brewed one yet, though obviously this needs to be rectified very soon. My buddy Sean (Chupa LaHomebrew here) brewed one a few years ago:
http://seanywonton.blogspot.com/2008/04 ... -sour.html
I don't think I ever tasted his but hopefully he'll chime in on the thread about his experience. Instead of lactic acid, you could ferment a gallon on the side with lacto & sacch and blend that with your finished beer - that might give you your desired amount of sourness. Just a thought...

Good luck & update us on how it goes, please.

[Dirk McLargeHuge]

Thanks all who replied. I still have a lot to learn, and it was a good thing I learned about the corn now. I was about to add some flaked corn to the steeping grain on an extract cream ale. But I still have yet to hear from anyone who has tasted or brewed an example of a Kentucky Common. Anyone?

I had the version brewed at New Albanian Brewing Company a couple of years ago. I liked it. It wasn't particularly sour, or at least I didn't notice it.

[dmtaylor]

Right. As a style, it's not super sour, just a tad to give it a little character. In Mike Dixon's recipe that I made, the Lacto is actually allowed to go crazy for a few days before the main batch is brewed, then it is killed in the boil and thus halted from progressing any further.

[AdamWiz]

Instead of lactic acid, you could ferment a gallon on the side with lacto & sacch and blend that with your finished beer - that might give you your desired amount of sourness. Just a thought...

I like that idea, I was thinking about doing something along those lines. Here's the basic rundown of what I was considering:
- brew up a small (1-2 gallon) batch of the beer
- add either a pure lacto culture or one of the blends like sour mix or berliner weisse(LHBS only carries White labs)
- let the small batch get more sour than I want the final beer to be
- brew up a bigger batch (maybe 3-4 gallons), ferment with neutral yeast(WLP001 or US-05)
- blend with the small soured batch

My questions would be: would adding just the White labs lacto culture to the small "blending batch" work, or do I need some regular sacch in there as well? If this is the case, would I be better off going with the sour mix? Also, what would be the approximate timeline for getting sourness in there? I know I need to be patient with sours, but I already have a couple of long-termers in carboys and was really hoping to make something I can actually drink without waiting a year, hence the consideration of lactic acid. If I keep up with this sour obsession, all my carboys are going to be tied up forever. Apparently it's not a good combination to be really impatient and also love sour beers Any and all feedback is always appreciated

-Adam

[AdamWiz]

In Mike Dixon's recipe that I made, the Lacto is actually allowed to go crazy for a few days before the main batch is brewed, then it is killed in the boil and thus halted from progressing any further.

So if I understand this correctly, if I do something like the procedure I discussed above, I should actually wait to brew the main batch until the small batch is sour to my liking and then add it to the boil while doing the main brew?(rather than separate fermentations and blending) Otherwise it will just continue to get more and more sour after I blend?

-sidenote: I think it's pretty funny that I started this thread by saying, basically "enough talk/theorizing, time for action" and 5 days later here I am still talking and worrying about techniques and not brewing. I swear every time I actually get around to brewing a batch, I have already brewed it in my mind about a hundred times. You can talk yourself out of almost anything the longer you think about it!