Bottle Day: Barn-Cat Black

Grogtag custom labels look great.

Today I bottled up the sour stout that I named Barn-Cat Black.  In my recent post I mentioned that I mixed the old sour beer with some fresh beer to pull back the acididty and add a bit more complexity.

It sat for a full week after I mixed everything together.  The smell is right where I wanted it.  You can smell that it is a sour.  I think this is important because your nose is the first thing that is going to experience the beer.  I did not want a beer that smelled like a stout and had a sour bite.  I think that would be a bit weird.  I want the drinker to know that they are drinking a sour once the pour it into their glass and smell the funky sourness coming from the beer.

The taste wasn't exactly as sour as I expected so I added a few more ounces of the straight sour into the bottle bucket.  Also included in the bottle bucket was some fresh WLP550 yeast along with some Champagne yeast and sugar mixture.  I hope that the freshness of the beer along with fresh yeast in the bottle bucket will bring me some luck with bottle conditioning these beers.  I have had some issues getting it where I want it to be.  Fingers crossed that it worked out well.  As you can see in the photo I went out and got some GROTAG labels.  Great product for projects like this.  I plan to make this over and over and just substitue out clean vs fruited versions.  The label you see here will be the main label and I am using the neck labels to write on the fruit or other ingredients used at bottling along with the vintage of the beer.

Two gallons of this will now sit and wait for the carbonation to build up and hopefully get to the level that I want.

The remaining two gallons where put on top of some Blackberry Pinot Noir must that will will ferment out over the next month or so.  This will then be bottled up with any adjustments needed after we test some bottles from this first batch.