Mixing Day: Sour Red

Sour red beer out.

This past weekend was a busy one.  I did find time to mix up the sour red though so here is a rundown of the day.

I took 3 gallons of sour red from my barrel and then mixed it with 2 gallons of clean red Belgian beer based on the tasting notes from our initial mixing day.  I have a 6 gallon glass carboy that they are going to sit in for two weeks total before I add some fresh yeast and bottle them up just like I did the sour stout.  What I did do that was a little extra was adding some of the sour stout I had left over.  The super acidic beer.  The sour red mix we made was lacking that sharper sour note to it.  I noticed that the packaged beer from the stout came out LESS sour than I thought it would based on the tasting.  I figured added a half gallon or so of the sour stout should at least help carry a little extra punch.  I will be curious to see how it does once it is all packaged up.

What was pretty amazing is that when I pulled the 3 gallons out of the barrel I figured I would have to put in 3.25 or 3.5 gallons back into the barrel to top it off.  To my surprise I needed to add over 4 gallons.  This means that over the year I had lost almost a gallon and a quart of beer to the "angels share". 

On a recent podcast of The Sour Hour they had the head brewer of Roddenbach.  They discussed the angels share and should they top off barrels.  Surprisingly again, the head brew master said, "no".  The goal is to create an acidic beer that can be blended back. 

Fresh, slightly sour young beer in for the long nap.

Now, their main goal is to blend beers.  I would love to get my barrel to a point where I don't have to blend.  For instance the first two pulls from the sour red barrel had to be blended to take out the oak flavor.  It is now producing some really complex beer without too much oak flavor.  I hope the main task now is for me to make sure the beer does not get too acidic and that I am able to maintain the quality of the barrel.  It's a solera barrel so I dont really ever plan on totally emptying the barrel.  I may at some point to just run some hot water through it and then just put the same beer back in, but that is about it.

Anyways - this beer will be bottled up within the next 10 days and a tasting will follow a month after that.

Also coming up is my second tasting of the sour stout.  It will have been 2 months in the bottle.  I will be able to test the carbonation level and to see how the flavor is developing.

Hard to imagine but at the pace I am going I should have all three base beers in bottles by the end of the summer and then all of the fruited versions coming off shortly after that.  Super exciting times.

Tasting Day and Mixing Day

The beer that will be tasted after my first blending
session. I can only hope it tastes as good as it looks.

Last night I went over to my friends house to watch the hockey game.  Naturally we wanted to drink some beers.  Since this weekend was set to be my first taste of the newly bottled sour stout I took over my 12oz "taster" bottle.  I also took over some beer from my red sour barrel along with the clean red Belgian I recently made so we can mix up some goodness.  Lets start with the mixing session.

Mixing Session:

I brought two pints of beer.  One a clean red Belgian ale and the other the 2 year aged sour red that has been sitting in my Cabernet Sauvignon barrel.

We started out by tasting the two without any mixing so we knew what flavors we were dealing with.  Once we knew what we had to work with we could then figure out where to go with our ratios.

The clean version was exactly that - very clean Belgian flavor from the WLP 550 Belgian yeast.  It had a light banana flavor.  Not nearly as strong as some of the German Hefeweizen beers.  It was sweet while still being thin.  You can really smell the caramel from the C60 malt but it only comes through in the final beer as generic sweetness.

Next up the barrel aged sour red.  First impression is that its sour.  That's good for making sour beer!  Behind the sourness is a weird harshness.  Astringent is the best way I can describe it.  My buddy said it was harsh but he liked it.  I did not know really what to think of it.  I too liked it but then also felt it had a burn to it.  This harshness was only up front.  It faded quickly.  This beer was also strangely sweet.  I can somewhat pick up a vanilla that might of been contributing to that perception.  There is a little tannin quality showing through too, but in no way is the beer saturated with oak flavor.

Looking at the tasting notes after trying both we came to the conclusion that all we really wanted to do was remove that harshness - or at least calm it down - while maintaining a sour edge.

We started with a 1:1 ratio.  This was not very sour.  All of the harshness has been removed from the upfront flavor with only a little in the back.  This is not our mix though.  A sour beer needs to be, well, sour.

Next up was a 2:1 ratio.   That harshness returned on this one.  this version atcually tasted more oak like than the straight version.  This is a learning lesson that those flavors may be in the beer and they may just be masked.  In this case the harsh flavor that we are getting was probably blocking us from tasting the oak and barrel flavors.  Too harsh.  On to the next mix.

3:2 ratio was still sour but it wasnt very astringent.  It had an overall smoothness that the others did not have.  Again some new flavors crept in.   This round we were getting what we could only describe as a piece of funky fruit.  Sounds pretty good right?  We thought this was a really good mix.  It wasnt as sour as I hoped for but it seems pretty balanced.  Let's try one more with a bit more sour in it.

3.5:2 ratio.  The harsh flavor came back to almost the same level as the 2:1 ratio without picking up too much more on the sour side.

In the end we like the 3:2 ratio and that is where I am going to start.  The reason I say that is where I am going to start is because I still have plenty of my sour stout that has a very sharp acid bite to it.  I may mix in a bit of that to pump up the final acidity in the mixed beer.

_________

The sour stout showing its tight bubbles from
carbonation. Also a bit of lacing.

Now onto the tasting.  The moment we have been waiting for.  It feels like I have been brewing sours for 2 years and have nothing to show for it.  A bunch of quick sour methods while I waited for my original batch of sour red to age in the barrel.  That first beer was far too oakey.  So back to the drawing board.  Next up with the sour stout.  I bottled it right around the 1 year mark but then time got in the way and it slipped into a two year aging process.  It was far too sour so I needed to blend.  Had to wait for that beer to age long enough and now here we are.

I did a 1.5 clean to 1 sour mix for this beer.  Mixed them together and let them sit for a week to mingle and marry together.  I then bottled with fresh yeast and priming sugar.  Then a long 4 weeks ensued.  I really wanted to taste the beer at the two week mark but I was able to make it the full 4 weeks (well actually 3 weeks and 6 days).

I took the bottle opener grab the bottle and just hoped I would hear that hissp sound when you crack open a beer. 

HISSSSSSSP! 

Good sign.  Next I wanted to see some resemblance of a head when I poured the beer.

Glug, glug, glug. HISSS. 

A very tight bubble head formed and quickly falls.  The tight beading sticks with the beer throughout and even leaves some lacing on the glass.  SUCCESS.  A carbonated sour beer!  Im way to excited at this point.

Now my nerves switch over to the ultimate questions - how does it taste? 

I take that first sip.

To my surprise, the beer is super balanced.  It's not as sour as I expected but you know you're drinking a sour beer.  You get a faint hint of the roasty and toasty stout flavors but in a very good way.  They dont clash with the sourness of the beer.  A balanced beer.  (for a sour)

After my first sip I just smile from ear to ear and tell my buddy he better try it.  At this point I was too happy to really critique the beer.  I will do that on the next taster or the first 750ml bottle. 

After my buddy drinks the beer he says "I wish you brought a full case of this because we could drink it all tonight"  The weird thing is that he was right.  This beer ended up being a very refreshing sour.  Not heavy like the head and color would suggest.  Crisp, sour, light and bright. 

I'm sure there are some flaws but I can look for those another day.  Today was about the joy of actually tasting 2 years of work in a small glass.

Now - ONTO THE RED!

Brewing Stuff

Just wanted to follow up on some stuff.

Last weekend I racked the Belgian Red into the secondary.  Everything looks great on that one so far.  I will be mixing the clean red with the barrel-aged red next weekend when I taste the sour stout that will have been in the bottle for a month.  The main goal for this day is two-fold.

1. When I taste the sour stout I should have a good idea how the fresh beer along with a fresh vial of yeast are interacting with the old sour beer.  On The Sour Hour podcast show, host Jay Goodwin says to never taste the beer in the bottle before the 2 month mark.  This is my ultimate goal for the larger 750mL beers that I bottled.  I bottled two 12 oz servings that I can use to gauge how my new bottling procedure is working.  These old sour beers are so old there is probably zero CO2 left in the beer and I have just had a tough time getting them to carb up.
2. Once I crack that tester bottle open, I should know how the process is going.  If I am getting better carbonation than I have in the past at the 1 month mark I will know that I can continue on with mixing the red sour the same way.

Some other things have happened since my last post.  I went to Country Wine and Beer supplies and saw Brett Claus and a Lambic yeast vial on the shelf.  They NEVER have these on the shelf.  I immediately grabbed them and took them to the counter to make sure they were not on hold for someone else.  Once they said I could buy the I was on my way back to the house to innoculate some more beer.

I have a molasses stout that was showing signs of infection and I decided to just push it by adding the spent yeast from my sour stout.  So for this beer I added the Lambic Yeast to  really get this thing funky.

As for the Brett Claus I decided to add that to the Sour Pumpkin Stout that was already dosed with Lambic yeast.  Just some more wild yeast armies to tackle the beer.  I dont plan to age these beer nearly as long as the other ones I have going.  I will bottle them right around the year mark so they are ready to drink during the holiday seasons of Halloween/Thanksgiving (Sour Pumpkin) and Christmas (Sour Molasses Stout).

I have some interesting fruit and spic combonations that I will try with them as well.

Anyways - next week should be a big week with a bottle taster and possibly another mixing session.