The Funk is Running Wild, Brother!

After two years of brewing sours it has finally happened.  I took a misstep somewhere along the line and I'm afraid all of my gear is now infected with the funk.  Bad thing?  Hell no.  It just means I need to buy more gear so I have some clean stuff again.  It also means I have even more equipment to sour even more beer.

Sounds pretty awesome to me.

So how did I figure out that my gear was infected.  Well, it was two batches in a row that had clear signs of infection.  In this case, it was the very early stages of a pellicle starting to form.  So what happens to those beers?  I just really push them off the deep end.

The Pumpkin Stout is now a Sour Pumpkin Stout.  The Blackstrap Molasses and espresso infused stout?  Yup.  A Sour Blackstrap Molasses Stout.

Something good came out of this (other than more/new gear) though.  A light went off in my mind.  I have been reading beer books one after another and even listening to beer podcast (currently listening to all of the Sour Hour episodes from the Brewing Network).  It's information overload.  One of those Sour Hour episodes talked about a sour peach beer based on the creators grandmothers peach pie.  When thinking about what to do with the Blackstrap Molasses Stout I thought of looking up a recipe for molasses baked goods.

Then the simplest thing strung together in my head.  Baking is similar to beer brewing. Flour is a grain.  Sugar is – well – sugar. And lots of baked goods utilize spices and fruit.  Sounds familiar right?

So what did I come up with?  A Dark Fruit Cake Sour Stout Recipe of course.  A cake made with molasses, coffee, fruit and spices.  My beer had molasses and coffee and sours taste pretty good with fruit and other spices.

So simple. Just a way I didn't think about brewing or flavoring in the past.  A lot of what I have been reading and listening to just all clicked together.

I will be mixing up the first batch of beers from the original sour stout recipe this weekend. The first step of really starting to roll out my sour beers for consumption.

Say Goodbye - The Last Bottle of Leuvens Witbier

I plan to make reusable labels and this beer
will be one of the beers in a steady enough rotation
that it will get its own label.

Usually in my brewing experience I am always 4-5 recipes ahead in my mind.  This means that sometimes I forget to really enjoy the beer that I have brewed and more importantly enjoyed.

One of my latest beers was a wit.  I was originally calling it a Peeterman Wit only to find out that that I was wrong in how  I categorized the brew.  It was not a brown beer like the Peeterman would of been.  This left me with the Leuvens Witbier.

These beers were most likely tart and citrusy from the coriander and lactobacillus and some fruit bitterness from the orange peel you typically find in your witbiers.

After reading "Brewing with Wheat" it seems that Jolly Pumpkins Calabaza Blanca may be the modern interpretation of what these beers might of tasted like.

I used the White Labs 550 that Jolly Pumpkin is said to use along with bottle dregs from two of their 750 mL Calabaza Blancas.

White beer in a Winter setting while the white stuff falls to
the ground.  Makes sense. Right?

At first the beer was sweet with little carbonation.  Initially it smelled like Jolly Pumpkin but it just tasted too sweet and citrusy.  It was a good beer then.  Just lacking carbonation.  But as the beer aged it started to morph into a great beer.  The funk from the Jolly Pumpkin dregs started to take over.  The beer dried out and became much more effervescent in the bottle.  At the 5-6 week mark this beer was in its prime and it was very reminiscent of Calabaza Blanca.

It tasted good enough that I plan to remake the batch.  Soon.

I am harvesting the yeast from the last few bottles.  I believe only bottle is left at this time. Once I collect the yeast from that last bottle I may do another batch within a month.  I have even decided to create a label for this beer which you see in the start of the post.

Until the next batch!

Brew Day: Sour Stout - 2015 Vintage

With  only a week or two left for the wine to ferment out we are about 3 months away from the time to fill the third and final barrel in the Vorpbrew household.  I plan to put the acid solution into the barrel to prepare it for the wine a month prior to when we think it will be ready.  I am going to leave it in a bit longer (acting as the holding solution) hoping that this will strip more of the oak flavor from the barrel so the wine and any beer to follow does not have as hard of a time stripping out the oak flavor. Three batches into my Cab Sauv barrel and the oak is very minimal and the smell and flavor it is producing is awesome.

With that said, I brewed up the 2015 version of the sour stout.  The flavor is awesome in the 2013 version and I am just waiting on some bottle testing to determine how to finally bottle and enjoy that batch for the next year or so.

Same recipe as last year so nothing new to report - other than it is bubbling away in its first run through fermentation. The earliest this will see the oak barrel is 4 months.  I am going to try to extend it out to 6 months.  I brewed a 5 gallon batch so the remaining gallon will come from the current sour stout batch I have.  This process helps keep with my solera method.

Within a month I plan to have tasted the bottle tester to see where we are with the 2013 batch. Look for a very excited post (hopefully).