Brew Day: Red Belgian Ale

Yesterday was a pretty nice day considering the terrible winter we had so it was time to get out and brew another batch of beer.  This batch will be another clean beer meant to be mixed with my sour red.  This year is all about getting my sour production into drinking order.

First was the mixing and bottling of the Barn-Cat Black, my sour stout.  Now I am moving towards bottling up my sour red which I am calling Roosters Red.  I made a pretty simple red beer with wheat, pilsner and caramel 60.  Nothing special.  I am fermenting it with my "house strain" of WLP 550.  This can really dry out the beer and leave very little sugar left behind which I am hoping makes it safe to mix with my sour beer that has brett, peddio and lacto.  I figure the less sugars available the less chance of something re-fermenting too far in the bottle.

This time next week I will have my beer fridge in the basement which I can somewhat control the bottles if they are getting too carbonated.  I stated above, this year is all about getting my sour production in order and a big part of that is figuring out how to mix and blend and more importantly bottle condition these things.

I know that I will be mixing some clean beer with the sour red because my sour red is pretty tannic.  It has a harsh bite and its asserting its barrel qualities a bit too much. Unlike the sour stout that was too sour, I am trying to calm those qualities by mixing in some clean beer.  I don't think very much needs to be taken out so I can see me only adding 25-30% fresh beer to a mixture of the barrel aged beer.  The sour stout was very sour and I figured a 50-50 split would calm it down.  It ended up needed 60% clean.  Based on that last blend I assume my 25-30 should be pretty good.  That's at least where it will start.

3 weeks from now I will mix them up and figure out my quantity just like the last batch.  Using tablespoons and teaspoons to make little shot glasses for tasting.  I will start at 25% clean and 75% sour and move up or down based on those results.

In the meantime,  I will be trying to squeeze in another brew.  I have the stuff to make a old-world porter with brown malt and some 6-row.  It wont be nearly as authentic as making my own brown malt that has the full diastic power to convert on its own but this is the best I can do with the malts available to me off the shelf.  I am just doing a small 2 gallon batch here.  One gallon to taste straight up and the other to of course sour in a one gallon jug for a year to test and see how this tastes.

If you're keeping track at home I have 5 sour/funky beers I plan to make on a consistent basis

1. Sour Red
2. Sour Stout
3. Lambic Inspired Sour Pale
4. Berliner with Peach
5. Witbier with Lacto

Something tells me I dont need to get another one in the rotation but a one gallon test cant hurt.

Finally,  I bought more Grogtags for the three big beers coming out of my "brewery".  Here is the graphic line up:

Bottle Day: Barn-Cat Black

Grogtag custom labels look great.

Today I bottled up the sour stout that I named Barn-Cat Black.  In my recent post I mentioned that I mixed the old sour beer with some fresh beer to pull back the acididty and add a bit more complexity.

It sat for a full week after I mixed everything together.  The smell is right where I wanted it.  You can smell that it is a sour.  I think this is important because your nose is the first thing that is going to experience the beer.  I did not want a beer that smelled like a stout and had a sour bite.  I think that would be a bit weird.  I want the drinker to know that they are drinking a sour once the pour it into their glass and smell the funky sourness coming from the beer.

The taste wasn't exactly as sour as I expected so I added a few more ounces of the straight sour into the bottle bucket.  Also included in the bottle bucket was some fresh WLP550 yeast along with some Champagne yeast and sugar mixture.  I hope that the freshness of the beer along with fresh yeast in the bottle bucket will bring me some luck with bottle conditioning these beers.  I have had some issues getting it where I want it to be.  Fingers crossed that it worked out well.  As you can see in the photo I went out and got some GROTAG labels.  Great product for projects like this.  I plan to make this over and over and just substitue out clean vs fruited versions.  The label you see here will be the main label and I am using the neck labels to write on the fruit or other ingredients used at bottling along with the vintage of the beer.

Two gallons of this will now sit and wait for the carbonation to build up and hopefully get to the level that I want.

The remaining two gallons where put on top of some Blackberry Pinot Noir must that will will ferment out over the next month or so.  This will then be bottled up with any adjustments needed after we test some bottles from this first batch.

"Brewery" Update

Finally had some time off this weekend.  Naturally, I spent some of it working on my brews.  The clean stout was done and ready to mix with the sour stout.  Measuring and mixing everything together was a fun process - but a difficult one.

In my previous post I mentioned that the 1:1 ratio was still too strong and that a 2:1 ration was too clean.  I knew I was going to be somewhere in between.

To make sure my previous tasting notes were accurate I did a 1:1 test first.
Wasn't as bracing as the first tasting.  Weird. It was 100% a sour beer .  No hint of stout flavors coming through though - this was just a calmer version of the very sour straight beer.

I then moved to the middle point with a 1.5:1 ration of clean to sour beer.  This gives me 60% clean beer mixed with 40% sour.   I was tasting the roast and toast flavors up from and then a sharp acidic bite at the end.  First tasting the was multidimensional. Promising.

Next up was 1.75:1.  This is roughly 63% clean.  Essentially I was reducing the sourness by 3%.  Amazing how quick the mix can change the beer because no there is no strong sourness.  It has tartness but not sourness.  It drinks like a thing stout that has a weird aftertaste.  If you think about it, Guiness is said to have 3% sour beer.  That little percent makes a pretty big difference in Guiness so it only makes sense that dropping down 3% makes this beer a much different beer.  In the end, not what I am looking for.  I want you to drink this and know that you are drinking an American Sour.

Final mix was a 1.25:1 or 55% clean vs 45% sour.  This one had minimal stout flavor with a very sharp sour edge.  Only slightly less acidic than the 1:1 ratio.  This shows that the 5% less sour was very minimal in the over flavor compared to the 50-50 split.  This probably has to do with my personal threshold for sourness.  I assume once it gets to a certain point the sourness is so strong it just blows out the rest of the flavors to a point that you cant pick out as easily.

The straight sour stout that I am using for mixing is coming in at 3.3 on my pH strips.  According the the American Sour Beers book my Michael Tonsmeire, sour beers can range from a pH of 3.0 - 3.9.  A beer that has a 3.9 reading would be tart and and a beer at 3.0 would have bracing acidity.  He goes on to suggest that beers below 3.0 are probably best used as mixing.  I felt that my taster bottle was too sharp and too acidic to really enjoy.  It was fun to try but I would have a hard time drinking and sharing 5 gallons of that straight. The final thing that he mentions is that the pH scale is logarithmic.  Basically each point is equivalent to 10 times more or less acidity.  So a beer that that is off by 2 points is twice as acidic.

Keep in mind lactic acid is going to be softer than acetic acid.  So the readings are not the sole determining factor.  I actually prefer sharp acetic bites to my sour beers.  I love the Flanders Reds.  I use plastic buckets which let in more oxygen which will contribute to the production of acetic acid. I will do a test on the mixed beer once I bottle on Tuesday to see what my pH strips say.

This first mixed batch comes in at roughly 3.75 gallons.  I am going to do two gallons straight an the rest on some of the must we saved from the wine.  This is a Pinot Blackberry.  I will add a bit of oak cubes to replicate the barrel flavor that we will get from my third barrel once it is up and in production.

I will update later this week with a pH reading and how the final blend tasted going into the bottle.  I hope that the three days mixed together will let the two flavors meld together a bit more and create a bit more rounded flavor.