Mike brewed his second batch of sour beer earlier this year and he split it into 2 separate vessels to try different things. Roll the video to learn more about our split batch sour ale tasting.

With batch number 2, Mike took the same recipe he used before and scaled it up from a 5 gallon final volume to 10 (or was that 12) gallons. Once he produced that much wort, he split it into two separate kettles to make two different beers.

For the first one, he wanted to recreate his Golden Sour beer. You can learn more about his first sour beers in this post.

With the other side of the split, he is going for a Flemish Red.

Split Batch Sour Ale Ingredients

For both beers, he used this grain bill:
Grains
16 pounds of Pilsner Malt
4 pounds of Wheat Malt
4 pounds of Flaked Oats

To make the Flanders Red, he steep these grains in a separate vessel from his mash tun and added them to the second kettle:
Grains
8 ounces of Special B malt
8 ounces of Caramunich malt
2 ounces of Carafa Special II malt

For his microbe/yeast mix, he had the Roselare blend and GigaYeast’s Sweet Flemish Brett.

For hops, he used a little bit of old Warrior hops he had that were in a open packet in his fridge.

Sour Beer Tasting Notes

I found the Golden Sour to be an enjoyable, tart beer that was a thirst quencher.

The Flanders Red did have more funkiness and we concluded that the flavor was influenced by the caramel malts.

Mike had let these two beer ferment in buckets for nine months and then he racked them into 2 glass carboys. He thinks that they are essentially done but there could be more experimentation to do.

As for next steps, Mike may bottle up half of each beer and then experiment more with adding some maltodextrin/dry malt extract into the Golden Sour.

For the Flanders Red, he may add some oak to the remainder of the beer.

It’s all a patience game with these sour beers that we have been brewing. We’ll keep you up to speed with the latest updates even though that could be months from now.

We’ll see how it goes.

If you wanted to see what Mike was alluding to in the video regarding his latest sour beer brewing session, you can see his Twitter post and see the awesome details.