Sour beer brewing is the next frontier in beer home brewing it seems. Its really starting to take off. For John and I its no different. We both have a sour project started and we are talk about what will come next. This week however we revisit my Flanders Red project with a quick tasting and we are pleasantly surprised.
My initial attempt at brewing a sour was sort of doomed before it started. If you recall, I had accidentally froze my Roeselare blend. When I was ready to pitch I had no microbes to pitch. To save the wort I pitched some Saison slurry and I pitched the thawed out Roeselare blend.
Fast forward to 9 plus months later and I had an interesting surprise. The base beer was pretty good, John suggested I split some for carbonation and the rest I would try and resurrect as a sour with fresh extract and a new pitch.
When I racked the beer into two separate vessels (keg and carboy) I tasted a small sample and was surprised at a true touch of sour. I forced carbonated the kegged half and with carbonation it really started to shine.
The beer has a definite clean sour character. Lightly acidic, very little if any acetic acid notes. There is a wood aged quality from the oak cubes and a nice balancing tannin quality late on the palate. The specialty malts and the wood and the sour seems to all come together with a subtle dark cherry Rodenbach like flavor.
Overall, I can’t complain. This one somehow turned around enough to be a minor success. I still have the other half that I plan to reseed and repitch into. From there I use those dregs to start a new 5 gallon batch. Maybe a golden sour is next.
Anyway, I got lucky this time. Pleasantly so.
How are your sour brewing efforts? Are you afraid to sour in your “brew house”?
Let us know with a comment and join the conversation.
BREW ON!
John
Wow – what a post!
Roger
I have two going right now. The first is a 1 gallon barleywine that I pitched the dregs from Jester King’s Ambree into about 8 months ago. It smells really good, and I’m looking forward to bottling it & pitching some dregs into another beer. The other is a 5 gallon cyser I made following Bear Flavored’s method of making the cider first, then racking it, pitching some Brett (Brett C) & feeding it honey to bring up the abv to about 14%. I added some oak cubes & have it aging. I checked on it the other day, and I am really looking forward to this one. I think next would be to make a saison & bottling it with some brett to see what happens. But I’ll start that one in a 1 gallon batch for testing. If it goes well, I’ll up it to a full 5 gallon. So far, it’s enjoyable & produces good beer that would retail for quite a bit (it seems most sours are expensive!) I’m not too worried about any contamination. I clean all sour items with a hot water rinse, followed by a soak in pbw. Nothing so far, but if it happens, I like sours. I’ll call it an experimental batch & move on. Good luck with the rest of the batch, and it’s nice to hear that this turned out good! Enjoy!
John
Thanks Roger!