Tasting Day: Sour Pale Ale

Back in early December I bottled two 12-oz bottles of the straight lambic-ish beer.  The hope was that I could have a taster to share at the holiday party.  After a month in the bottle it looked like the beer was sick.  It had snot like build up in the bottle.  It looked scary.  After a few months in the bottle they are starting to clear out.  I only have two bottles so I wanted to be as sure as I could that the first bottle would be worth opening.

This weekend was the weekend to open it up.  the snot build up seemed to be gone and really it just looked like there was a lot of yeast floating around.

I cracked open the bottle and heard a faint whisp meaning we had some carbonation - my enemy so far is sour home brew.

Its poured with a very small head as you can see in the photo to the left.  Its a very pale yellow color and looks amazing in the winter sun.

The smell was amazing.  It smelled just like you would want a lambic.  Funky brett aroma with some lemon peel in the nose.  Really nice stuff.  Not any off-putting aroma.

The taste...  The taste was awesome. I cant believe how well this beer is after one year. Honestly the only thing I did not "like" about the beer is that the aroma made it seem like it would be more tart.  The tartness is not quite to a Lindemann's Gueze tartness but this is a straight lambic styled beer – not a gueze.  To be honest this is one of the better straight lambics I have ever had.  Cantillon is very hard to find around here and when you do find it, it's usually really expensive.  The ones that I ahve had are almost always flat and are way more in the territory of basement funk than bright tartness.

If you click on the image and get the full size image you will see the one major problem.  The snot in the beer was most likely a weird flocculation issue with the lambic yeast.  It has still not settled out and there were bigger groupings of yeast than you would want in a finished beer.

When the first pull from the barrel happens I will most likely put it in a carboy and place in the refrigerator and then use gelatin to clear it up as much as a can.

Cant wait to try to oak aged version with Riesling notes  lingering throughout the beer.  March or April is when I plan to move it out of the barrel and into carboys to keep the oak from taking over.  And then it will be time to mix with fruit and then bottle.  Hopefully by the summer I will be sampling some versions of this beer in its final state.