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.
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