Why the 24-h time frame for the experiment?

One of our backers, Klara Junker, asked a great question: why limit the experiment to 24 hours? In other words, aren't the following days and weeks (sometimes months and years in barrels) important for sour beers?

We're investigating the first 24 h for a variety of reasons. First, that's the time course of the sour mashing that Blue Owl Brewing does. They've found that they can get all of the acid production they need in their sour tun in about a day by following titratable acidity levels. They even developed the concept of the sourness unit (SU) to measure everything and build in consistency in their beers (check out a write-up of the process here).

Another reason that we're focusing on the first 24 h in this project is that others have taken a stab at the sour beer microbiome in the past, mostly looking at the ethanolic fermentation and bottled beer stages (i.e., what happens after Day 1). Although we believe our approach and methods are superior to what's already been done, there's no use trying to reinvent the wheel when the parts are so expensive.

And that's really reason #3: price. Molecular biology is expensive! The budget that we're trying to raise funds for is bare bones. It doesn't include money for anyone to do any of the work, for Jeff and Blue Owl to make and collect the samples, etc. We would love to see this thing become over-funded, just so there would be a little wiggle room to cover publication costs and things of that nature, but let's not get greedy until we hit 100%...

Keep the questions coming!