Brew Day: Rooster Red Sour

I have beer in my first barrel that is ready to be bottled.  It is a combo of two brews.  One of those brews which makes up over 60% of the beer in the barrel is now 25 months old. The other batch is roughly 13 months old. 

I use the solera method of mixing and souring beers.  I beleive that this is the first batch coming out of the barrel that will not need to be tweaked after leaving the barrel.  The first batch which was a "quick" sour that was made using the soured wort method and it came out with way too much oak flavor.  I think the barrel has finally stopped giving off the oak flavor and now the test bottles that have been coming out taste great.

The issue I am still having is how to properly carbonate these things.  On homebrewtalk.com you will read how some people always have carbonation problems.  Others say they never have problems.  I tried to bottle a few bottles of the red sour last month using two Brewers Best Carb drops. Nothing.  I then bought the new capsules from Northern Brewer that have a bit of yeast in the capsules to ensure carbonation.  After two weeks very light carbonation but I would still consider this unacceptable.  The review on those capsules is that it can take a bit longer than the two weeks they list on the bottle.  With how old this beer is the only live yeast are probably the small amount of wine yeast I added and whatever is in the capsule and of course the Brettanomyces.

I am have one bottle left in my test that I am going to age until the two month mark and see if that improves the carbonation some.  Maybe the Brett will eat up the sugars from the capsules and turn this into the beer I know it can be.

So–anyways–this post says "brew day" so why am I talking about this older beer.  Well, the goal is within three months, when I know how to properly bottle and carb the beer, I will take all but one or two gallons out of the barrel and then either bottle straight or mix with fruit before bottling.

Mockup of my labels.  I have three barrel that use
the solera method of mixing and creating beers.
This means I will have a steady stream of these
beers.  This is the Roosters Red label.  I saw my
cousins Grogtag lables and instantly knew
I needed them for my barrel beers.

To do this, I need to have another batch of beer ready to go into the barrel.  So I made another batch of my Roosters Red (see logo in masthead of the site).  It's a Flemish sour red ale.  Of course its mixed in my Cab Sauv barrel using the solera method.

The brew day started with a major hiccup.  I forgot to put hte false bottom in before mixing in my grains for the mash.  UGH.

I used a large grain mesh bag to line my hot liquor tank/cooler to dump the beer into. While I cleaned out the grain from my valve and tubing and then put in the false bottom and transferred everything over.

After that everything was great.  I was having issues hitting my target gravity lately so I was wondering if it was because I was not rinsing my grain as much as I used to when only using a false bottom.  When using the false bottom as my only straining/filter system I would mix the wort back through the grain many times over.  Once I started to use the false bottom with the large mesh bags inside my cooler I didn't mix it back through as much because the wort was running clear much much sooner.

I ignored the clear running wort and kept mixing it back through many times over.  I dont know if that cured what issues I was having but I hit my target OG right on the head.

This batch is actually going to be mixed with the first batch that was too oaky.  I cracked all the bottles open and pour them into a carboy to degas them. The sweetness from this batch mixed with the strong oak flavors will hopefully balance out and make a good mix.

This will go in with the other old beer once the main stages of primary fermentation are complete.  I feel comfortable enough now to age these beers long term in the barrel.

So hopefully in a year we will see how batch #3 does.  More on batch #2 once the carbonation issue is figured out.