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.