Bottle Day: Sours

This weekend had a lot going on. Blending, bottling, dry hopping, transferring to secondary and more.  This is just a real quick update on my bottle updates.

First up, I bottled my Kriek.  I bottled this the same way as my previous sours.  One exception is that I read that you can reduce a bit of the tannin from the barrel by using gelatin.  I decided to give it a whirl.  I transferred the beer to what would be a tertiary, actually a 4th fermentor, to get the beer off the fruit.  I then put it in the fridge after adding the gelatin.  Let it sit for a while to clear up and then brought it back to room temperature.  After it was at room temp I added fresh yeast (WLP 550) and sugar. Bottled and capped with the bench capper.

I did the same thing for my currant and raisin sour.  This was only a gallon, but it followed the same process.  This beer had very little fruit particle compared to the cherry.

Cant wait until these are ready.  The Kriek is a super red and cherry smelling beer.  I hope it tastes half as good as it smells.  The currant and raisin has a very wine like scent.  Again, cant wait for this one.

The brewery is running on full cylinders and I am pumping out a lot of sours now.  Hard to believe that after this spring and summer of mixing and bottling that it will soon be time to start all over again.  January is not too far away and that marks the one year anniversary for the batches currently waiting to go into barrels.

Blending Day: Sour Pale Ale

Not only did I mix up some sour pumpkin, I also mixed up the sour pale ale. This was a pale ale that was soured with the Wyeast Lambic blend and it has been going for about 18 months now.  It currently resides in one of my barrels.  The barrel was originally home to a homebrew Resiling. Idea here is to bring out the green apple flavors that can be common in lambics and exaggerate those with the green apple notes in a resiling. 

We tasted the beer directly from the barrel.  The delicate nature of the base beer is a blank canvas for the bugs and wine barrel to create their own flavors.  The beer from the barrel is slightly funky, very minimal actually, with a sharp crisp wine flavor.  That wine flavor has that green apple note we were looking for so mission accomplished. What this beer was missing, strangely enough, was more of a beer flavor.  This beer as it stands today is a great wine and beer hybrid like the Dogfish 61 minute (I may even bottle one or two of this straight) but it wasn't reminiscent of a lambic from Belgium.  It needed more funk and more citrus, sour twang.  How do you get that you ask.  By blending.

I had brewed up a Witbier a few weeks back for this exact purpose.  The Witbier I brewed last year was slightly tart with huge citrus notes from the orange peel and coriander.  After tasting Sour Monkey, a sour beer made from Victory's triple beer I felt OK about mixing a beer with orange peel and coriander so I wanted this to be a beer I could use for blending.  From that same brew day I saved 2 gallons of wort that came in around 1.032.  I added lacto and Brett Lambics at 100 degrees with the hope to get a really gnarly funky and tart beer.  This beer mostly came out funky.  Big barn yard nose with grassy hay and it has a bit of that medicinal scent I have seen in some of my other 100% brett beers.

So first up was trying to add some acidity or harness and mainly cut back on the wine flavor.  I did a 6:1 mix of the sour ale with the witbier.  It seemed a bit more sour, not much, with a bigger hit of citrus.  Most importantly the wine flavor was really knocked back by just that little bit of witbier.  It was knocked back enough that it wasn't so dominating.  This version had no funk.  So, enter the funk.

Next was 6:1:0.5 of pale sour, witbier and gnarly funky barnyard beer.  It had a sour bite to it.  No really harshness showing through.  Wine is well subdued and the apple flavor was popping a bit more.  This could maybe be attributed to the lacto-brett beer.  It was showing some funk but nothing crazy.  Overall I really liked where it was.  But we still wanted to try for some more funk.

So I reversed the ratio of witbier and funky beer.  Simple put this had a funky nose a bit of sourness but it started to give of a medicinal thing.  I call it band-aid like.  It was minimal, but it scared me.  This was my friends favorite mix.  I just couldn't pull the trigger with the thoughts of the full batch getting band-aid like.  I have had this happen before and that is no fun.

To solve that I decided that since we liked the beer straight and we like the funk flavor to be higher than the citrus punch from the witbier that the next logical step was to just even out the witbier and funk beer.  6:0.5:0.5 blend of the three beers.  It was grassy with a pleasant funk smell with some wine notes still shining through and just a bit more citrus.  It tasted similar to the funky version without being too concerned with the funk taking over.

The one thing I might play with on final mixing day is added lactic acid to the mix.  This will be the dry lactic acid.  I just want to add a bright sharp acid note to make the beer a bit brighter.  I will probably mix these up and let them sit for a week and then divide them up.  I have 4 destinations for these beers.

1 gallon will be saved for Gueze.

1 gallon will be mixed with Peaches and Apricots

1 gallon will be straight

2 gallons will be mixed with home grown raspberries.

Out of this batch only the 1 gallon with be bottled right away.  The fruited versions will sit for another 2 months and then be bottled and sat down for 2 months while the Gueze gallon will sit for another 2 years.

Blending Day: Wild Pumpkin Ale

This past weekend was another busy one in the VorpBrew brew house.  Biggest thing that was accomplished was blending some new batches and bottling others.

First up was the Chocolate Pumpkin Ale that I let get wild and funky with some Brett Lambicus yeast.  This one was brewed almost exactly a year ago.  I let it sit on the Lambicus yeast after noticing that my equipment might have been infected with a previous sour batch.  Instead of pitching I decided to just let it go with this yeast and see what happened.  I wasn't going to put another clean beer in the fermentor anymore so I had the space!

After a year of getting funky I am surprised to say it wasn't all that funky.  It drank like a somewhat tart and sour pumpkin beer with notes of cinnamon spice and chocolate in the background.

We start all mixing sessions by taking the base beer and tasting it straight up.  From there we determine where to go based on what other beers we have to blend.  In this case we had the ability to add more spices or add some sour stout to give the beer a bit more tang.

We were really struggling what to do with this beer after tasting it.  It was surprisingly subtle and multilayered in flavor but it was just missing something.  So we just started to add some other ingredients to the base sour beer.

We added a sprinkle of pumpkin pie mix to the soured beer and really liked how it brought out the spices just a bite more.  So that was determined as a good direction.

We then added some sour stout.  First ratio was 12:1.  That one part sour really added a more rounded flavor than anything.  It didn't necessarily make the beer more sour but it made the sourness that was already there... fuller. The one thing this ratio did was completely mask the chocolate and you really had to hunt for the chocolate.  So the next step was to reduce the ratio to 24:1 to try and bring back the chocolate flavor.

The 24:1 ratio brought back the chocolate and it somehow made the beer more sour.  Less sour stout and it makes it tastes more sour!  Didn't understand this at all.  My buddy was blind to most of the mixing so I would tend to wait for his response before giving mine and it was confirmed that somehow this beer was more sour.  Weird.  Anyways, back to the tasting.  This version had a bit more pumpkin but not much more that the 12:1 ratio.

We decided that the 12:1 ratio was the way to go because we really liked how it just made a more round flavor in the sourness and it still had a bit of the pumpkin flavor.  We opted for the spice to add that traditional pumpkin pie flavor rather than a beer that was a bit one dimensional.

I mixed this up and its now sitting in a carboy marrying together.  I plan to keg most of this batch to try out kegging a sour so it will be ready relatively quickly. I plan to bottle some others for next year and see how they age over time.

Brew Day - Melting Pot Pale Ale

Fresh picked hops.

This past week I harvested my hops.  I did not harvest enough to make a full beer with just those hops but I did have enough for a whirlpool addition.  First year I let the vines grow and take hold. Second year all i wanted to do was see if the hop flowers could grow.  The growing conditions in my back yard are not the greatest.  If I am able to make one beer from the hops I grow my self I consider that a success.  Now that I know that the hops can grow I am going to build a proper trellis so I can see if I can grow a few more for next year.  Anyways. On to the beer of the day.

The hops I grow are cascade. I figured that I should brew the beer that introduced cascade to a lot of craft beer drinkers – Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.  I took a base recipe from BYO and tweaked it to make it my own.  The recipe said to use Perle, a German hop, along with Magnum, a highly alpha acid American hop and then finally the star of the show Cascade.  Uses some American 2-row and C40.

I tweaked the recipe to make it more of a true American mutt.  A melting pot of different nations.  I used Belgian 2-row and an English strain yeast.  So in have hops from Germany and America.  Malt from America and Belgium and yeast from England. Four nations to make a simple pale ale.

My hops with some additional for a nice
soak in the hot wort

Brew day was OK.  I had a very cement-like grain bed and it was pretty hard to get all the wort I needed without mixing everything up.  My gravity was a bit low after sparging so I added a bit of extra light malt extract and just a tad bit of sugar.  Ended up getting my gravity right where I needed it by the end of the boil.

Chilled the wort, pitched the yeast and now it's time to wait and see how the true American Melting Pot of ingredients turns out.

Double Brew Day! - White Wool Witbier and Funky Berliner Weisse

This past labor day I labored away on two new brews.  This is the first time I used the last runnings to make a small beer.  The main beer I was brewing was my witbier - the working title is White Wool.  Same recipe as last year.  Only difference is that I could not find any Jolly Pumpkin witbier so I do not have any dregs.  This will show me how much of that yeast really influenced last years beer.  I thought last years beer was great!

I have since learned that what I brewed was not a Peeterman Wit.  It was more of a old-world Leuven Witbier. To offset no Jolly Pumpkin, I added a little bit of lactic acid bacteria.  In this case it was Lacto Brevis.  So in a few weeks we will learn how much that Jolly Pumpkin yeast added to that beer.

Brew day was simple.  I ended up with about 4 gallons of 1.052 wort which was right on target.  Fermentation took off and is currently firing away on all cylinders.

The second beer I am making is a Funky Berliner Weiss.

I took the last gallon of sparge water I had left over and drained off another gallon of wort from the grain bed.  I did not boil that. Hoping that some of the funk from the malt will last and help funkify the beer some more.  I then mixed in one gallon of the Witbier to provide some hop and boiled wort.  I didnt want the Berliner to taste too much like wort.  I've read a few articles on how no boil Berliners can have that "raw" wort flavor.  Hoping the half boil vs half unboiled makes a nice in-between style.

I then added Lacto Brevis for 24 hours.  It was ripe – I mean funky –after that 24 hour rest.  I only cooled the beer to 120 when I pitched the lacto to help build up the sourness a bit quicker.  It seemed to work because this was nice and funky.  To make it a bit more funky the only yeast that will see this beer is Brett Lambicus.  When doing a 100% fermentation with Brett (though technically the lacto probably converted some of the sugar to alcohol) Brett Lambicus is supposed to have a funky fruit flavor.  Some say pineapple while I have seen some reviews say that it can pass as a Cherry fruit beer when using as "primary"

I only pitched one vial with no starter with the hopes of stressing the yeast some to get some more traditional funk in a short time.  24 hours later there is airlock activity and things are progressing.

The hope with this beer is that I can use it to mix my Pale Sour which will be coming off the oak very shortly to add some sourness or funk.  If its not needed I can just mix with some fruit and make a funky Berliner.

More to come as it happens.