Mixing Day - Testing

The clcean Dark Dawn stout that I brewed was ready to move to the secondary last weekend.  I used this time to do a test mixing to see where I thought the final ration may come in.  I started out by doing a one-to-one ration.  I did this by mixing 1.5 oz (shot glass) of soured stout with 1.5 oz of the clean stout.  I mixed them back and forth in two glasses to ensure everything was mixed well and then took a sip.  To my surprise the it was still very sour.  I only pulled a few ounces to I had enough flat beer to give it another try. 

This time I did a 2-1 blend.  Two parts clean and one part sour.  Amazingly this was too clean.  I had the lady of the house try this blend to make sure I did not blow out my taste buds on the first one.  She tried the 2-1 blend without having the previous blend and agreed.  Only slightly sour.

So where does this leave us now?

When its time to do the final blend I know that its going to fall somewhere in between 1-1 or 2-1 blend.  I like to keep round numbers so I am going to try 1.5-1 and then go from there to either 1.25-1 or 1.75-1.  Hopefull one of those three solutions will work for our tastes.

No matter the solution, I am going to need to make another clean batch to help finish the rest of the sour beer. The most I need based off of this preliminary blend is 2 gallons out of the 4.5 to 5 gallons that  I have soured.  I only need to save one gallon to put into the new barrel once its ready. I should have about 1.5-2 gallons left over for blending with a new clean beer or I can decide to save it and just have it to up the sourness in any other beer I create moving forward.

Tasting Day: Sour Pale Ale

Back in early December I bottled two 12-oz bottles of the straight lambic-ish beer.  The hope was that I could have a taster to share at the holiday party.  After a month in the bottle it looked like the beer was sick.  It had snot like build up in the bottle.  It looked scary.  After a few months in the bottle they are starting to clear out.  I only have two bottles so I wanted to be as sure as I could that the first bottle would be worth opening.

This weekend was the weekend to open it up.  the snot build up seemed to be gone and really it just looked like there was a lot of yeast floating around.

I cracked open the bottle and heard a faint whisp meaning we had some carbonation - my enemy so far is sour home brew.

Its poured with a very small head as you can see in the photo to the left.  Its a very pale yellow color and looks amazing in the winter sun.

The smell was amazing.  It smelled just like you would want a lambic.  Funky brett aroma with some lemon peel in the nose.  Really nice stuff.  Not any off-putting aroma.

The taste...  The taste was awesome. I cant believe how well this beer is after one year. Honestly the only thing I did not "like" about the beer is that the aroma made it seem like it would be more tart.  The tartness is not quite to a Lindemann's Gueze tartness but this is a straight lambic styled beer – not a gueze.  To be honest this is one of the better straight lambics I have ever had.  Cantillon is very hard to find around here and when you do find it, it's usually really expensive.  The ones that I ahve had are almost always flat and are way more in the territory of basement funk than bright tartness.

If you click on the image and get the full size image you will see the one major problem.  The snot in the beer was most likely a weird flocculation issue with the lambic yeast.  It has still not settled out and there were bigger groupings of yeast than you would want in a finished beer.

When the first pull from the barrel happens I will most likely put it in a carboy and place in the refrigerator and then use gelatin to clear it up as much as a can.

Cant wait to try to oak aged version with Riesling notes  lingering throughout the beer.  March or April is when I plan to move it out of the barrel and into carboys to keep the oak from taking over.  And then it will be time to mix with fruit and then bottle.  Hopefully by the summer I will be sampling some versions of this beer in its final state.

Brew Day - FINALLY! - Dark Dawn Clone Recipe - Clean

Benefits of brewing in the winter -
free wort chiller is on the ground

It's been too long.  I hate winter for more than the normal reasons.  I hate it because my brewing production takes a nose dive.  The weather finally cooperated and I was able to get outside and brew up this batch of Dark Dawn.

This is the recipe that Ron Jefferies provided to The Jamil Show: Can You Brew It.  I followed it pretty much exactly as it was laid out except I added a pinch of molasses to the boil kettle.

The sole purpose of this beer is to be a clean beer to blend with my sour stout.  The soured portion is just a tad too sour.  I think a 60-40 blend will do well and create a very well balanced sour.  I will finalize those proportions once I have the clean beer to mix with some sour.

I will do a small mixing in shot glasses to get it just right.

I will then break the beer off into multiple batches for fruited and non fruited versions of the beer.
I am even going to test killing off the wild yeast with some tabs that are used in wine making to stop fermentation.  I will then pitch a new vial of yeast and let that sit for a day or two before bottling with sugar.

Some of these batches should be bottled in the next month and then they will sit for at least another two months before trying.  Here is my break down on how I am going to split this 6 gallon batch:

1 Gallon = Sour and Sweet Cherry
1 Gallon = Blackberry Pinot Noir Juice
1 Gallon = Plum
2 Gallons = Straight
1 Gallon = Straight = Kill the yeast prior to adding fresh yeast

Hope it goes well.

Check back in April or May for the tastings.


Brew Notes:

• Initial mash temperature was a bit low - Came in at 144F.  Sat at 144F for 15 minutes
• After boiling water - I adjusted the temp up to the desired 148F and let it sit for 45 minutes
• Batch sparged - Rinsed the grains for ten minutes while recirculating the wort through the grain bed.  Collected 1.25 gallons on the first run.
• Added 3 gallons of 168F water and let it sit for 10 minutes
• Rinsed grains for another 10 minutes after.
• Final amount of wort collected = 4 gallons
• Pre Boil gravity = 1.024
• Brought it to a boil
• Added 4.5oz Raw Organic Sugar
• Added 3.5 oz White Table Sugar
• Added 1.5 oz Blackstrap Molasses (added a bit more sugar due to lower pre boil gravity)
• Brought back to a boil
• Added 0.5 oz Nugget pellet hops at 60min left.
• Added 0.7 US Fuggle at 30min left.
• At flameout - added 2.2 organic wildflower honey
• Whirlpooled
• Chilled to 70F with wort chiller and snow bank
• Pitched WLP 550 vial after shaking 3 gallon better bottle. Filled to roughly 2.6 gallon mark
• Placed the carboy in the family room were the temp is set to 68F.
• 15 hours later very strong fermentation
• 17 hours after pitching yeast the better bottle started to swell.  Airlock was blocked.  Inserted blow off tube