Barlow Brewing

This one is my first attempt at a Flanders Red.  And with how much I’ve been digging on and obsessing about sour ales, it was only a matter of time. Although this one will test my patience in aging it full term.

I brewed it on the Saturday of Memorial Day Weekend (5/23/09), and the base formula was riffed off of Jamil’s Recipe despite the fact that his grain bill seems a little complicated for the style.  I played it loose with the base grains, and used some of my British Golden Promise instead of Pilsener malt.  I rounded that out with Vienna, Munich, Wheat, Aromatic CaraMunich and Special ‘B’. 

I also used hop plugs for what might be the first time in my ~14 years of brewing.  Now that my keggle is up and in action, I might be leaning more towards whole hops over pellets since they should filter out better with the new set-up.

The game plan here was to control some of the sourness by initially fermenting it with a clean, American yeast.  So the original gravity was a 1.058 when I pitched the Safale-05.  I let that go for 48 hours and then I racked it into a secondary, which is my wild and funky PET container, and pitched the Roeselare blend.  (The Wyeast 3763 Roeselare is a Rodenbach blend of lambic cultures and lactic bacteria.)  By that time, the batch had fermented down to a 1.026, and I figured that would give the wild bugs a lot of sugars to slowly eat through over the next 18 months.

It is standard to age these beers in oak barrels as well, but that is a little harder to do on the homebrew level.  To compensate for this, I added 1 ounce of medium toast French oak cubes to the secondary.  My twist is that I first sanitized the cubes by steaming them, and then I soaked them in pinot noir for about a month before pitching them in the secondary.  This is not a standard practice, but the Flanders Red style is red-winish and often called the “Burgundy of Belgium”.  Inspired the Avery Brabant, which is aged in zinfandel barrels, it seemed like an interesting thing to do.  I’m hoping it’ll add a tiny bit more complexity.

One week down and 71 one more to go.  Damn.

And, yes, this already has been named “Stupid Sexy Flanders”. (Thank you, Matt.)

This coming weekend I’ll being hitting the SAVOR Craft Beer and Food Experience.  This is the second year for this Washington DC event, and I’ll be driving up to check it out.  The gig is based around pairing gourmet foods with the appropriate beer.  Well, actually, the other way around.  There will be a lot of breweries represented that I have had before, but I will be concentrating on the brews that do not typically make it from the west coast to Virginia.  I love the east coast brewing scene, but I’m excited to try some of the hop-heavy and sour beers from the west sayeed.

This is will also be a chance to hang out with some of the rock stars of craft brewing.  To insure that I get the proper amount of that, I am also attending the Lupulin Reunulin the night before at the RFD.  In attendance that night will be Tomme Arthur (Lost Abbey), Vinnie Cilurzo (Russian River), Adam Avery (Avery Brewery), Rob Tod (Allagash) and Sam Calagione (Dogfish Head).  This bunch is sometimes referred to as the “Brett Pack” after their group trip to Belgium a few years ago and for their love of brettanomyces.  These guys are supposed to have a lot of great stories which bubble out during these sessions.

I only got into one salon, but it is the beer and cheese pairing with Greg Koch of Stone Brewing, so I know that will be a lot of fun, too.

I will be hitting these events with some close friends and hopefully meeting up with some beer lovers I’ve met through the internet and Twitter.  It will be a very interesting, and liver killing weekend, and I will be tweeting (BarlowBrewing) as much as I can and hopefully posting pictures later.