Mystery sour part 3: not quite so mysterious anymore.

My sour that I tried making out of an eventually well-attuned pilsner/ saison hybrid did almost nothing in the wild, neutral barrel. What was I expecting? Magic?

It has some funk on the nose, but not much, and the pH is firmly between 4.3 and 4.4, which isn’t sour. So one of twothree things happened:

• After the pilsner and saison yeasts were done, there were no residual sugars left to metabolize.
• The barrel was essentially aseptic.
• The hops inhibited the growth of any bacteria.

Which one was it? I have no evidence, but I lean towards the lack of metabolizable resources. I thought about just dumping it, but that is no fun. The ingredients were a sunk cost so there was no reason to throw bad money after good, but I wanted to give this thing a shot.

I had given to me a while back 30 oz of blackberry puree. I went to the LHBS and picked up a pouch of Wyeast lactobacillus brevis. I dumped the recently unfrozen puree and the lacto and a few days later… I have airlock activity. It lives!