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Solera Project Starter Tasting

Three months ago I started a Golden Sour Ale in a standard fermentation bucket. For this video, I cracked open the bucket took a look and grab a quick sample with my thief for a taste. The outcome was quite startling.

The best sour beers are normally produced by blending different vintages or barrels with different character together to achieve a certain flavor profile in an end product. In the home brewing environment this can be a bit difficult to do space limitations and patience (I think mostly patience!). One option to avoid holding batches for blending is to use a Solera.

A Solera is a series of vessels that each containing a different vintage of aging sour beer. For my project I’m going to use three vessels. When all vessels are full the magic of the Solera process begins to work. half the volume of the oldest vessel is removed for packaging (and yes this one is an unblended product at this time). To make up for that lost volume half the volume from the second oldest vintage is moved into the oldest vessel to bring the volume back to 5 gallons. Then half the volume of youngest vessel is moved into the second. Fresh wort is then added to that youngest vessel to top off and begin to ferment.

The process continues and each time half the volume is moved forward for packaging and the remaining vintages get blended along the way. I plan to use three vessels and use a 6month cycle time for moving. If you are following along it means that the my first beer will age for 18 months before it hits the bottle… it will have been in the different stages of fermentation for 2 years at that time.

The little tasting we took is incredible at this point. Noticably sour but not aggressively so. Wonderful golden in color and crystal clear. It will be hard to simply rack it over and not package some to enjoy. Guess I’ll have to start a quick fermenting Berliner Weisse to keep me from dipping into the Solera beers.

Do you have a Solera going? Ever wondered about the process? Well check back in a couple months when I move the beer along and we take another sample.

Cheers!

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1 Comment

  1. Frank

    Your solera project is the bomb!

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