Brewing Stuff

Just wanted to follow up on some stuff.

Last weekend I racked the Belgian Red into the secondary.  Everything looks great on that one so far.  I will be mixing the clean red with the barrel-aged red next weekend when I taste the sour stout that will have been in the bottle for a month.  The main goal for this day is two-fold.

1. When I taste the sour stout I should have a good idea how the fresh beer along with a fresh vial of yeast are interacting with the old sour beer.  On The Sour Hour podcast show, host Jay Goodwin says to never taste the beer in the bottle before the 2 month mark.  This is my ultimate goal for the larger 750mL beers that I bottled.  I bottled two 12 oz servings that I can use to gauge how my new bottling procedure is working.  These old sour beers are so old there is probably zero CO2 left in the beer and I have just had a tough time getting them to carb up.
2. Once I crack that tester bottle open, I should know how the process is going.  If I am getting better carbonation than I have in the past at the 1 month mark I will know that I can continue on with mixing the red sour the same way.

Some other things have happened since my last post.  I went to Country Wine and Beer supplies and saw Brett Claus and a Lambic yeast vial on the shelf.  They NEVER have these on the shelf.  I immediately grabbed them and took them to the counter to make sure they were not on hold for someone else.  Once they said I could buy the I was on my way back to the house to innoculate some more beer.

I have a molasses stout that was showing signs of infection and I decided to just push it by adding the spent yeast from my sour stout.  So for this beer I added the Lambic Yeast to  really get this thing funky.

As for the Brett Claus I decided to add that to the Sour Pumpkin Stout that was already dosed with Lambic yeast.  Just some more wild yeast armies to tackle the beer.  I dont plan to age these beer nearly as long as the other ones I have going.  I will bottle them right around the year mark so they are ready to drink during the holiday seasons of Halloween/Thanksgiving (Sour Pumpkin) and Christmas (Sour Molasses Stout).

I have some interesting fruit and spic combonations that I will try with them as well.

Anyways - next week should be a big week with a bottle taster and possibly another mixing session.