Brew Day: Golden Sour Mixers

Recently I bought a carb cap.  You take the cap and put it on a normal plastic bottle with a screw top bottle and hook it up to your gas.  Shake, shake, shake and shake some more.  Keep repeating until the bottle stays firm.  Boom!  You have carbonated beer.

This is a great tool for sour makers.  We spend so much time aging these beers we want to make sure we get things right.  What I am able to do with this tool is mix and carbonate very small samples of beer and taste how they will be under carbonation.

Recently I carbonated my golden sour straight from my 5.2 gallon barrel.  I wanted to taste what this beer was really like before determining what to mix in with it.  To my surprise, its really great as is.  I do think it could use a tiny bit of funk and a bit more lactic twang.

With these two things in mind I went to work.  I brewed up a 5 gallon batch of the base golden ale recipe.  I split that into two 2.5 gallon fermentors.

Batch 1 got dosed with American Farmhouse yeast from White Labs.  This has been sitting for a week and the yeast has taken it down from 1.052 - 1.008.  I am going to let this one sit a bit more with a hope that it will go down another 2 points.

Batch 2 was dosed with Lactobacillus Delbrueckii and Lactobacillus Brevis for 2 days prior to adding yeast.  After the two day period I added a blend of Brett Trois and my "house" strain of WLP 550.  After a week this beer is only down to 1.022.  Still got a ways to go.  I'm calling in the big guns and going to order up some Wyeast French Saision.  This yeast is known to plow through almost anything.  Last time I had a slow and sluggish fermentation I used this yeast and it was down to terminal gravity within a few days.

Once they are both finished I will do a little mixing and testing with my plastic bottle.  Once I finalize a mix I will be off to the races towards bottle day.

Bottle Day: Sours

This weekend had a lot going on. Blending, bottling, dry hopping, transferring to secondary and more.  This is just a real quick update on my bottle updates.

First up, I bottled my Kriek.  I bottled this the same way as my previous sours.  One exception is that I read that you can reduce a bit of the tannin from the barrel by using gelatin.  I decided to give it a whirl.  I transferred the beer to what would be a tertiary, actually a 4th fermentor, to get the beer off the fruit.  I then put it in the fridge after adding the gelatin.  Let it sit for a while to clear up and then brought it back to room temperature.  After it was at room temp I added fresh yeast (WLP 550) and sugar. Bottled and capped with the bench capper.

I did the same thing for my currant and raisin sour.  This was only a gallon, but it followed the same process.  This beer had very little fruit particle compared to the cherry.

Cant wait until these are ready.  The Kriek is a super red and cherry smelling beer.  I hope it tastes half as good as it smells.  The currant and raisin has a very wine like scent.  Again, cant wait for this one.

The brewery is running on full cylinders and I am pumping out a lot of sours now.  Hard to believe that after this spring and summer of mixing and bottling that it will soon be time to start all over again.  January is not too far away and that marks the one year anniversary for the batches currently waiting to go into barrels.

Blending Day: Sour Pale Ale

Not only did I mix up some sour pumpkin, I also mixed up the sour pale ale. This was a pale ale that was soured with the Wyeast Lambic blend and it has been going for about 18 months now.  It currently resides in one of my barrels.  The barrel was originally home to a homebrew Resiling. Idea here is to bring out the green apple flavors that can be common in lambics and exaggerate those with the green apple notes in a resiling. 

We tasted the beer directly from the barrel.  The delicate nature of the base beer is a blank canvas for the bugs and wine barrel to create their own flavors.  The beer from the barrel is slightly funky, very minimal actually, with a sharp crisp wine flavor.  That wine flavor has that green apple note we were looking for so mission accomplished. What this beer was missing, strangely enough, was more of a beer flavor.  This beer as it stands today is a great wine and beer hybrid like the Dogfish 61 minute (I may even bottle one or two of this straight) but it wasn't reminiscent of a lambic from Belgium.  It needed more funk and more citrus, sour twang.  How do you get that you ask.  By blending.

I had brewed up a Witbier a few weeks back for this exact purpose.  The Witbier I brewed last year was slightly tart with huge citrus notes from the orange peel and coriander.  After tasting Sour Monkey, a sour beer made from Victory's triple beer I felt OK about mixing a beer with orange peel and coriander so I wanted this to be a beer I could use for blending.  From that same brew day I saved 2 gallons of wort that came in around 1.032.  I added lacto and Brett Lambics at 100 degrees with the hope to get a really gnarly funky and tart beer.  This beer mostly came out funky.  Big barn yard nose with grassy hay and it has a bit of that medicinal scent I have seen in some of my other 100% brett beers.

So first up was trying to add some acidity or harness and mainly cut back on the wine flavor.  I did a 6:1 mix of the sour ale with the witbier.  It seemed a bit more sour, not much, with a bigger hit of citrus.  Most importantly the wine flavor was really knocked back by just that little bit of witbier.  It was knocked back enough that it wasn't so dominating.  This version had no funk.  So, enter the funk.

Next was 6:1:0.5 of pale sour, witbier and gnarly funky barnyard beer.  It had a sour bite to it.  No really harshness showing through.  Wine is well subdued and the apple flavor was popping a bit more.  This could maybe be attributed to the lacto-brett beer.  It was showing some funk but nothing crazy.  Overall I really liked where it was.  But we still wanted to try for some more funk.

So I reversed the ratio of witbier and funky beer.  Simple put this had a funky nose a bit of sourness but it started to give of a medicinal thing.  I call it band-aid like.  It was minimal, but it scared me.  This was my friends favorite mix.  I just couldn't pull the trigger with the thoughts of the full batch getting band-aid like.  I have had this happen before and that is no fun.

To solve that I decided that since we liked the beer straight and we like the funk flavor to be higher than the citrus punch from the witbier that the next logical step was to just even out the witbier and funk beer.  6:0.5:0.5 blend of the three beers.  It was grassy with a pleasant funk smell with some wine notes still shining through and just a bit more citrus.  It tasted similar to the funky version without being too concerned with the funk taking over.

The one thing I might play with on final mixing day is added lactic acid to the mix.  This will be the dry lactic acid.  I just want to add a bright sharp acid note to make the beer a bit brighter.  I will probably mix these up and let them sit for a week and then divide them up.  I have 4 destinations for these beers.

1 gallon will be saved for Gueze.

1 gallon will be mixed with Peaches and Apricots

1 gallon will be straight

2 gallons will be mixed with home grown raspberries.

Out of this batch only the 1 gallon with be bottled right away.  The fruited versions will sit for another 2 months and then be bottled and sat down for 2 months while the Gueze gallon will sit for another 2 years.

Blending Day: Wild Pumpkin Ale

This past weekend was another busy one in the VorpBrew brew house.  Biggest thing that was accomplished was blending some new batches and bottling others.

First up was the Chocolate Pumpkin Ale that I let get wild and funky with some Brett Lambicus yeast.  This one was brewed almost exactly a year ago.  I let it sit on the Lambicus yeast after noticing that my equipment might have been infected with a previous sour batch.  Instead of pitching I decided to just let it go with this yeast and see what happened.  I wasn't going to put another clean beer in the fermentor anymore so I had the space!

After a year of getting funky I am surprised to say it wasn't all that funky.  It drank like a somewhat tart and sour pumpkin beer with notes of cinnamon spice and chocolate in the background.

We start all mixing sessions by taking the base beer and tasting it straight up.  From there we determine where to go based on what other beers we have to blend.  In this case we had the ability to add more spices or add some sour stout to give the beer a bit more tang.

We were really struggling what to do with this beer after tasting it.  It was surprisingly subtle and multilayered in flavor but it was just missing something.  So we just started to add some other ingredients to the base sour beer.

We added a sprinkle of pumpkin pie mix to the soured beer and really liked how it brought out the spices just a bite more.  So that was determined as a good direction.

We then added some sour stout.  First ratio was 12:1.  That one part sour really added a more rounded flavor than anything.  It didn't necessarily make the beer more sour but it made the sourness that was already there... fuller. The one thing this ratio did was completely mask the chocolate and you really had to hunt for the chocolate.  So the next step was to reduce the ratio to 24:1 to try and bring back the chocolate flavor.

The 24:1 ratio brought back the chocolate and it somehow made the beer more sour.  Less sour stout and it makes it tastes more sour!  Didn't understand this at all.  My buddy was blind to most of the mixing so I would tend to wait for his response before giving mine and it was confirmed that somehow this beer was more sour.  Weird.  Anyways, back to the tasting.  This version had a bit more pumpkin but not much more that the 12:1 ratio.

We decided that the 12:1 ratio was the way to go because we really liked how it just made a more round flavor in the sourness and it still had a bit of the pumpkin flavor.  We opted for the spice to add that traditional pumpkin pie flavor rather than a beer that was a bit one dimensional.

I mixed this up and its now sitting in a carboy marrying together.  I plan to keg most of this batch to try out kegging a sour so it will be ready relatively quickly. I plan to bottle some others for next year and see how they age over time.

Brew Day - Melting Pot Pale Ale

Fresh picked hops.

This past week I harvested my hops.  I did not harvest enough to make a full beer with just those hops but I did have enough for a whirlpool addition.  First year I let the vines grow and take hold. Second year all i wanted to do was see if the hop flowers could grow.  The growing conditions in my back yard are not the greatest.  If I am able to make one beer from the hops I grow my self I consider that a success.  Now that I know that the hops can grow I am going to build a proper trellis so I can see if I can grow a few more for next year.  Anyways. On to the beer of the day.

The hops I grow are cascade. I figured that I should brew the beer that introduced cascade to a lot of craft beer drinkers – Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.  I took a base recipe from BYO and tweaked it to make it my own.  The recipe said to use Perle, a German hop, along with Magnum, a highly alpha acid American hop and then finally the star of the show Cascade.  Uses some American 2-row and C40.

I tweaked the recipe to make it more of a true American mutt.  A melting pot of different nations.  I used Belgian 2-row and an English strain yeast.  So in have hops from Germany and America.  Malt from America and Belgium and yeast from England. Four nations to make a simple pale ale.

My hops with some additional for a nice
soak in the hot wort

Brew day was OK.  I had a very cement-like grain bed and it was pretty hard to get all the wort I needed without mixing everything up.  My gravity was a bit low after sparging so I added a bit of extra light malt extract and just a tad bit of sugar.  Ended up getting my gravity right where I needed it by the end of the boil.

Chilled the wort, pitched the yeast and now it's time to wait and see how the true American Melting Pot of ingredients turns out.

Double Brew Day! - White Wool Witbier and Funky Berliner Weisse

This past labor day I labored away on two new brews.  This is the first time I used the last runnings to make a small beer.  The main beer I was brewing was my witbier - the working title is White Wool.  Same recipe as last year.  Only difference is that I could not find any Jolly Pumpkin witbier so I do not have any dregs.  This will show me how much of that yeast really influenced last years beer.  I thought last years beer was great!

I have since learned that what I brewed was not a Peeterman Wit.  It was more of a old-world Leuven Witbier. To offset no Jolly Pumpkin, I added a little bit of lactic acid bacteria.  In this case it was Lacto Brevis.  So in a few weeks we will learn how much that Jolly Pumpkin yeast added to that beer.

Brew day was simple.  I ended up with about 4 gallons of 1.052 wort which was right on target.  Fermentation took off and is currently firing away on all cylinders.

The second beer I am making is a Funky Berliner Weiss.

I took the last gallon of sparge water I had left over and drained off another gallon of wort from the grain bed.  I did not boil that. Hoping that some of the funk from the malt will last and help funkify the beer some more.  I then mixed in one gallon of the Witbier to provide some hop and boiled wort.  I didnt want the Berliner to taste too much like wort.  I've read a few articles on how no boil Berliners can have that "raw" wort flavor.  Hoping the half boil vs half unboiled makes a nice in-between style.

I then added Lacto Brevis for 24 hours.  It was ripe – I mean funky –after that 24 hour rest.  I only cooled the beer to 120 when I pitched the lacto to help build up the sourness a bit quicker.  It seemed to work because this was nice and funky.  To make it a bit more funky the only yeast that will see this beer is Brett Lambicus.  When doing a 100% fermentation with Brett (though technically the lacto probably converted some of the sugar to alcohol) Brett Lambicus is supposed to have a funky fruit flavor.  Some say pineapple while I have seen some reviews say that it can pass as a Cherry fruit beer when using as "primary"

I only pitched one vial with no starter with the hopes of stressing the yeast some to get some more traditional funk in a short time.  24 hours later there is airlock activity and things are progressing.

The hope with this beer is that I can use it to mix my Pale Sour which will be coming off the oak very shortly to add some sourness or funk.  If its not needed I can just mix with some fruit and make a funky Berliner.

More to come as it happens.

Summer Homebrew and Seafood Boil: Tasting Day Galore

Yesterday was the "grand opening" of my "tap room".  This may also be known as a basement with a refrigerator and two taps installed with a small bottle fridge next to it but you get the idea.  I shared 5 homebrews with my friends yesterday and I am here to recap those beers.

Overall, it seems all of the beers were appreciated and one seems to have rose to the top. All of the beers are gone so something went right.

One downside to only having a 2.5 gallon keg for these is that we actually kicked the Kiwi Apricot Saison and the Three Blind Mice "Brett" IPA rather quickly.  On the plus side, it means I can try more beers and it will force me to brew more often, something that has become harder to do with work, planning for a wedding (and making the beer for it) along with owning a house that just takes time away on the weekends.

I am going to provide a condensed tasting notes from each beer and then provide my overall impression and thoughts on how to move forward.

Here we go!  Up first...

Three Blind Mice - Brett IPA with Mango Juice
I really love this beer. It has nothing to do with the fact that I made it.  At 7.35% it drinks like a session.  It's bitter with a fruity nose along with a fruit hop bite.  What I really like is that is ends with just enough of a twist that it just isn't some other fruity hop IPA.  That finish was best described by my one friend who said smoky.  The smoky finish could what I call the funk bite.  This of course coming from the "brett" yeast that was solely used to create the beer.  As we know now, this yeast, Brett Trois, isn't actually brettanomyces (brett-a-no-mice-ez).  They are saying it's a wild saccharomyces yeast strain.  Hopefully by now you figured out why I called it Three Blind Mice.

Overall - I don't really plan to change this recipe. The one thing I will change is upping the bittering hop addition.  I tried to match the extract potency with pellet hops and I think I miscalculated slightly.  Another ounce in the beginning of the boil should do it. It will also help balance the extra sugar and ABV coming from the Mango juice.  I thought the juice addition was near perfect.  It made the beer have an extra fruity dimension without it punching you in the face and taking over the beer.

I do however plan to brew 5 gallons at a time when I make it going forward.

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Kiwi Apricot Saison
This beer...  I don't know what to say.  This is exactly what one friend said too.  Another said "It's trying to be something, I just don't know what"

I think this is a case of too much going on.  I tried to make a saison with New Zealand hops, apricot, Brett Trois and French Saison yeast.  In theory all of the elements made sense.  New Zealand hops are fruity, almost wine like.  Apricot is, well, fruit. Brett Trois has tropical fruit esters and my experience of French Saison to this point was a nice fruity funk. Sounds like a decent concept.

It just did not come together in the first pint.  The beer was a grassy, wine heavy beer with a slight hint of farm yard funk.  One friend said he got sulfur in the finish that added that saison funk he knows of.

Why did I say it did not come together in the first pint?  Because you have to get over the first pint and everything being thrown your way.  Once you do its actually a really drinkable beer.  It just messes with your head and it's hard to decide if you like it.  The Nelson Sauvignon hops created such a wine heavy smell and flavor that you didn't know what you were drinking at first.

Overall - Solid experimental beer.  I will go back to the Saison drawing board on this one and use the design philosophy of KISS - Keep it simple stupid.  I think next year I am going to return to my original recipe with my original noble hops and add the apricot to that recipe and see how ti comes out.

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Barn-Cat Black - Sour Stout
Holy shit. That's all I need to say.  This beer didn't taste too good in the bottle after 3 months.  But now.  It's almost exactly as I saw the beer coming out when my girlfriend and I mixed this batch.  It has just enough roasty and toasty flavors to let you know you have a stout and it has the crispness, funk and sour edge you would expect from a sour beer. Im still in a bit of shock as to how this beer that almost turned into vinegar was saved by my first blending experience.  These bottles will be savored and only come out on special occasions moving forward.

Overall - This beer has showed me that blending is a must for homebrew sours, not just commercial sours.  Even though my blending method is super simplified it works out pretty well.  I just took the super sour beer and made a new batch of clean Belgian inspired stout.  Mixed them until I got the acidity where I wanted it along with the roast and toast flavors.  The key is using a yeast that will make a really, really, dry beer.  In my case WLP 550.  This way you give yourself some assurance you wont create bottle bombs.  So far so good.  I will most likely be blending every batch to try and gain that balance.  I'm sure there will be occasions where I may say screw it and go for a straight blend but this beer was a huge learning opportunity.


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Roosters Red - Flemish Style Sour Red
Double Holy Shit~!!!!  This is the first bottle I opened of this beer.  When me and my buddy mixed this ratio we kept getting a harshness that I couldn't explain.  Maybe the tannin from the small oak barrel but it was just harsh with some sour sweetness.  We mixed until the harshness was as minimized as we could get it.  To my surprise this beer had ZERO harshness.  I don't know what to say other than I was blown away. I can't wait to try this on a day where I don't consume as many beers as I did yesterday to get a true read on it but initial tastings are through the roof when it comes to expectations.

Overall - Pending a clean tasting day next time I crack one of these open there is nothing else to say other than FINALLY.  After tasting my first two traditional sours that went from too oaky, harsh, vinegar, thin, flat and really just uninspired, I think I now have the confidence to really start making some great sour beer.  One friend described this beer as "Great.  As good as most and better than some commercial examples"  Nothing more you need to say.


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Golden Geese - Lambic-Inspired Pale Ale
Interesting beer.  It feel a bit flat.  This of course came after we had the other sours listed above.  It has the flavor needed in a lambic - funky, funky, funky, tart, horsey, etc.  They just need turned up or dialed in more.  It tastes young at 18 months. This bottle was a bottle that I saved from when I transferred the beer into the barrel.  So technically, this is an unfinished product and guess what, thats what it tastes like.  I will blend the barrel beer with a fresh batch and hopefully regain that balance.  I amy even make a "clean" lacto belgian Blonde to mix with to punch up the acidity.  I feel the beer has the funk it just needs some more to go along with it.


Overall - It tasted incomplete.  That's good because this beer is incomplete.  I will be bottling the barrel version in September.  Around Christmas or so we should know where we landed with this one.


I would say this was a successful day of debuting some new homebrew beers to my friends.  Here is how the ranked the beers for the day.

5. Golden Geese
4. Kiwi Saison
3. Three Blind Mice
2. Barn-Cat Black
1. Roosters Red