What?! Brewing pickles and sauerkraut? Well, yes actually. Properly done, these wonderful foods are actually fermented. Not with yeast like beer, but rather with bacteria. In fact, one of the nastiest enemies to the beer brewer, is the closest friend when making pickles and kraut.
What You Need
Basically all you need is a big white plastic bucket like used in brewing, as well as some basic kitchen implements, and when it is done you need mason jars, a large pot, and all the other canning supplies. It is
extremely important that you do not use the same bucket for brewing that you use for kraut! And in fact you want to ferment you pickles and kraut someplace away from your beer, and store your equipment in a different place as well. The bacterium which ferments pickles and kraut is extremely harmful to your beer, and if it should infect your beer equipment it may be impossible to get rid of it. For our kraut and pickles we use old brewing buckets, and we mark "KRAUT" on the side in several places with a felt tipped marker.
And of course you need pickling salt. You absolutely cannot use table salt because it contains iodine, which inhibits bacterial growth and also causes discolouration of the pickles. Any type of salt that does not contain iodine should be fine, including : kosher salt, sea salt and pickling salt.
The Basic Process
It's really quite simple - there is a bacterium lactobaccili which lives naturally on the surface of many fruits and vegetables. If you create the right conditions, you encourage this bacterium to grow, and part of it's natural growth process is to ferment starches and sugars (and alcohol) into a type of vinegar. How do you create the right conditions? Well, it is simply a matter of soaking in a brine solution with just the right concentration of salt : 8 cups of water and 1/2 cup of pickling salt. To this you also add 1/4 cup of vinegar just to lower the pH a bit to help fight off molds in the first few days, after which the pH of the solution will be dramatically lowered by the fermentation and production of acetic acid.
You first wash and process the fruit or vegetable according to what is is you are making, then you submerse it in the brine solution, put a plate (we use a Phil's Phalse bottom that does not get used for beer) and a weight on top to keep everything below the water level, and wait about a month. The bucket should be kept at about room temperature, and every day you have to skim the scum that forms. In the first few days you will probably get a bit of mold, which is generally a bad thing that you do not want, but don't sweat just a little - just skim it away. After the first few days the pH should be low enough to inhibit molds. You will then start getting a slimy, disgusting skin forming on the surface of the brine. Your instincts as a homebrewer will be tough to fight against, because you've been trained to dread this substance. But in our case it is actually a good thing, and a sign that things are working as they should. Every day skim away as much of the skin as you can (don't worry if you can only get 3/4 of it), and continue this for about a month.
Cucumbers and plain white cabbage both have lactobaccili on them so you can ferment both into pickles and sauerkraut respectively. Red cabbage has a natural form of iodine in it which does not permit the bacterium to grow on it, so you cannot ferment it into red kraut. We also learned by trial-and-error that bell peppers do not have the bacterium living on them, so soaking them in a brine solution simply causes them to rot after a couple of weeks, and stink the high heaven!
Recipes
