Lambic-ish Update

Big day yesterday.  When I brewed the Peeterman Wit my friend stopped over to help brew.  He was the one how had the 5 year old sour yeast starter that we wanted to bring back to life.

The nasty but yet lovely pellicle on the lambic-ish

Anyways – while he was over I was showing him some of the sour projects I have going.  I pulled out my lambic-ish beer and cracked open the seal for the first time. This was probably right at the ten month mark.  OH BOY!

The smell was INTENSE. In a good way. The moment I smelled where it was I knew it was well on its way.  I made the decision then that it was time to move it to the barrel in the next month.  To do so I needed to do a few things:

1. Brew another lambic-ish beer to have it ready for mixing or to have it aged when it's time to pull this beer off the oak.
2. Get the wine out of the barrel and bottled

As for brewing another lambic-ish beer I decided to just brew the same recipe except  I pitched Roeselare yeast as the main yeast and then added a bit of the lambic trub yeast when moving to the barrel.  I'm looking for a variety of flavors and wasnt a good mix of bugs inoculated in the barrel.

I brewed this batch roughly 3 weeks prior to putting the old beer in the barrel.  I plan to age the lambic-ish for 3-4 months in the barrel before pulling it out.  I'm trying to control the oak flavor a bit more on this batch. I learned in the Flanders red that the oak flavor is super intense even after a wine has aged in the barrel.  This means that my new batch will be 4 months old at a minimum by the time my lambic-ish beer may need to come out of the barrel.  I will probably brew one more pale ale beer to use to blend out the oak in the first batch and just have that ready.

Getting the wine out of the barrel

My girlfiend and I actually wanted to drink this wine.  Riesling is her favorite wine.  That's why I used Riesling instead of Chardonay like Russian River and many other other American Breweries.  I also thought the flavor profile of the Riesling would go great with the lambic style beer. 

This was a very light wine.  It had very little flavor from the beginning.  Now after 3 months in the barrel it has picked up all the tannins and really dried out.  It left a "burny" taste as my girlfriend stated.  To get this wine back to a drinkable and more flavorful wine we had to mix.  I decided to mix it with an apple juice and sugar combo.  I took 3 cups of sugar and dissolved that into one frozen can of concentrate 100% apple juice.  We added the syrup little by little until we got to a "I-can-drink-that" flavor.  We ended up using the full mixture.  It must of been that dry.

Mixing the wine with apple syrup and taste testing

Once we had the mix I bottled the wine.

I then took one bottle worth and added directly back into the barrel and then the lambic-ish beer went on top of that.  A fresh does of Roeselare was added for more bug infection into the barrel and to help quickly eat through the new wine mixture with the added sugar.  I also wanted to note that now the lambic-ish beer smelled EXACTLY like commercial examples I have had.  Think Cantillion, Lindemans etc.

Finally, another bottle worth of wine was added to the new young lambic-ish.  Most of the sugar and wine flavor will probably get chewed up by the brett and other bugs but added complexity none the less.

The exciting part is that I bottled two 12 oz bottles of the lambic-ish beer straight.  I plan to crack these open at the holiday party at our house and at the family get together.  I just want to see what it taste like straight and then how it carbonates up.

Be sure to follow up after the holidays as I really really hope to have an awesome tasting day.