Barlow Brewing

Back in August of 2009, I took a fully fermented homebrewed saison batch of mine and split it into two 3-gallon carboys. On one I put a vial of Brett B, and on the other I pitched the dregs of an Avery Brabant. The initial post about the sour saison experiment is here.

I haven’t post anything about the tasting of these two batches simply because I haven’t bottled them yet.  (Despite the fact the Brabant version has won a silver medal in a BJCP competition. Ahhh, the joys of wine thieving….)  I will be bottling that soon, hopefully this week.

But the clear winner was the Brabant version.  It was more tart, sour and refreshing.  (More to come later) But this wasn’t a really fair race.  The Brett B version was purely a brettanomyces addition, and the dregs of the Brabant included brettanomyces, lactobacillus, pediococcus and whatever else was cultured up from the bottle.

So, never leaving well enough alone, I decided to play with the Brett B saison before bottling. I’m not a huge fan of the Americanization of Belgian and French beers, but I have had a few interesting ones of late.  I really liked the aroma hop kick of the Flying Dog Raging Bitch Belgian IPA, and seemed like it would be fun to try dry-hopping my saison with American hops.

Without look it up, it was clear to me that the dry hop aroma from the FDRB was Amarillo hops. So took 1 oz of some Amarillo hops and dropped them into carboy, which holds about 2 gallons of sour saison at this point. The look of it is disturbing.

Through the neck of the carboy

Amarillo hops and the remaining bits of pellicle.

The mixture of green Amarillo pellet hops and the remaining bits of pellicle is glorious.  But, unfortunately, it was difficult to photograph. If you aren’t familiar with what these sour beers look like, I think it might be unsettling. Honestly, it looks like some sort of tomatillo salsa verde thing.

But I am loving the look of this, and the smell is already amazing.

I’ll leave the hops on the saison for about a week, then I’ll bottle them up.

The second split batch experiment happened on Sunday night with my latest saison.

I’ve done a few saison homebrews, and I always find I enjoy the soured batches just a little bit more. Saisons are not complete strangers to sour, and some of the more famous examples of the style from Brasserie Fantôme and Brasserie à Vapeur  are amazing because of those notes.  I find souring adds more complexity to the beer, and I find myself ramping up the acidulated malt that I put into the mash a little more each time.  The idea behind this experiment was to ferment a saison and then to add brettanomyces to sour the batches and add further complexity.  Put another way, I wanted to sour these the old fashion way.

It started out as one of my standard saison batches with the not-so-secret ingredient of some acidulated malt.  It started out with an OG of 1.068, and I fermented it at around 80 degrees.  It dropped down to a 1.006 less than a week later, and then I let it sit for another week just to clean itself up and let the yeasts drop out.  (I say “yeasts” because I pitch a saison yeast, in this case WLP565, and then a clean Cal ale yeast, the Safale US-05, 48 hours later to insure the beer dries out enough.)

On Sunday (8/23/09), I split the batch evenly between two 3-gallon carboys.  Into one carboy I pitched a vial of White Labs Brettanomyces Bruxellensis (WLP650), and into the other I pitched a starter I had ramped up from the dregs of an Avery Brabant.  (Yes, this is deviation from the original souring gameplan.)

The Brett B is a pure culture of that brettanomyces strain and it is often used for secondary fermentation of Belgian beers and lambics.  It creates a medium intensity sour, and it is often pitched at bottling by brewers.  The Avery culture is a bit more of a wildcard.  It is my understanding that the Brabant undergoes a secondary fermentation brett b, too, but it probably isn’t the same culture as the tube.  In addition, it is a bottled beer so I don’t know if any Lactobacillus (Lacto) and Pediococcus (Pedio) bacteria are present which would additional tartness and perhaps add a vinegar quality to the beer.

Since the final gravity of the beer was so low, the bretts shouldn’t have too much to feast upon and that should control the souring to a certain degree.  As of two nights later, the brett b carboy doesn’t appear to be doing anything visually, but its airlock seems to be under a bit more pressure.  The Brabant carboy is getting a white foaminess to it, and may be forming a pellicle. 

I’m not sure how long I will let these beers age and evolve.  I will likely taste them every so often and see if they are in a place where I want to bottle them.  I would think the Brabant, since I don’t know exactly what was in there, might have a better chance of being bottled earlier since it might sour faster and benefit from bottling and a reduced exposure to oxygen.

We’ll see where this one ends up. 

As a sidenote, I did use my wine thief a few weeks ago to fill up a few bottles of the pre-brett saison for tasting and a homebrew competition.  I tasted one right before the split and it was very, very good.  It made it harder to pitch uncertainty into what was an amazing beer, but at least I know I have the recipe I want dialed in for the future.

The recipe for giggles:

Le Moribond – (Saison) 2009

 Starting Gravity: 1.068 (8/2/09) Days @ 80° F

Final Gravity:  1.006 (8/23/09)

8.15% alcohol (by volume)

Apparent Attenuation: 90.71

Real Attenuation: 73.35

Mash (147° 60 min)

10 lb Pilsener Malt

2 lb Golden Promise

1 lb Munich Malt

0.75 Wheat Malt

0.25 CaraMunich 40

0.25 Acidulated Malt (Sauer)

1 lb Cane Sugar

Boil (70 minute boil)

2.0 Hallertauer Leaves (4.3 AA) (60 min)

0.75 Hallertauer Leaves (4.3 AA) (0 min)

1 tablet Whirlfloc (Boil – 15 min.)

½ tsp Brewer’s Choice Wyeast Nutrient Blend (Boil – 10 min.)

Primary (>80° F)

White Labs WLP565 – Starter made

 Safale-05 – Packet pitched after 48 hours in primary

I’ve mentioned before that I love sour beers, but they take  a long time to ferment and age.   This means their feedback loop is long, and that it is difficult to tweak recipes and experiment with them in timely way.  Jeff gave me a good suggestion about tasting them every few months and taking notes. 

Despite the fact it is common for these styles to simply taste awful until one arbitrary day, many months later, when they turn into something magical, I think I will try to do that.  It may or may not be valuable data, but it is taking an action of sorts and that is a tiny bit of relief. 

This is a Flanders Red, and it started with an original gravity of 1.058 on May 23^rd and it dropped to a 1.026 two days later with the help of a packet of Safale-05.  At that point, I racked it into a secondary PET carboy, pitched the Wyeast Roeselare blend, and added 1 ounce of medium toast French oak cubes that I had steamed and soaked in pinot noir for 2 weeks.

A mere month and a half later, the gravity is down to 1.012.  The PET container had small, floating bits of pellicle, but no noticeable other activity.  I pulled a  4 ounce sample off the carboy, measured the gravity and poured it into a tasting glass.

The appearance was a light brown with gold and ruby highlights.  Very warm and inviting.  It appeared at bit thin, which is not unusual for a style that ferments down so low.  

It is very early in this young beer’s life, but there were hints of subtle barnyard notes in the aroma and taste.  (More so in the taste.)  I couldn’t not detect any sourness and they was plenty of malt flavor in there for the bugs to dig into for the next year. 

It was interesting for me to see how quickly the yeast and lambic cultures have torn into the beer.  It appears that it will take quite a while for the lactic bacteria to do its job and to sour and acidify.  I’m not known for my patience, but I will try to be.

I’ll taste this one again at the six month mark.

I was pretty excited to hear about Victory Brewing Company’s  WildDevil Ale.  Victory makes a lot of great beers, and what they did with this one was brew up a batch of their HopDevil, a hophead’s dream of an IPA, and then ferment it out with 100% brettanomyces.  This sounded like a very interesting idea and a bold experiment.

I bought two big bottles of WildDevil and brought one to a party to share, and stowed one away for myself to review when I could give it my undivided attention.  When I tried it at the party, and shared it with friends, it was a letdown.  It was getting towards the end of the evening, after a good bit of Oberon and some of my homebrewed lambic, but it can across as strangely both dull and prickly.  I was hoping that tasting it under optimum conditions would change my opinion. 

No such luck. 

It was in a 750-ml bomber that was corked and caged.  The bottling date was April 22, 2009, and I poured it into a tulip glass.

The beer was a glossy, stained wood brown with bold orange highlights.  The head was thick, but wispy sea foam in composition (not the color).  Each bubble was apparent and separate, and did not meld together into a creamy top.

The nose of this was a perfumey sourness, with citrus and lemon zest.  A mild brett character slid through occasionally.

The taste was all over the place.  There was little of the barnyard character, but it was mired in an unfortunate amount of dryness that drags the off-flavors to the forefront.  There was a soapiness delivered on a dry aspirin platter than made this one hard to get through.  Sometimes a beer is undrinkable, or you just want to call it a day and walk away.  This one wasn’t quite that bad, but every time I put it down, it was easily forgotten.  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to drink it, but rather than there was nothing in it to make me want more.  It was an absent-minded chore to get through this bottle.

I cannot recommend this one, and I’ve having a hard time believing that laying this one down for a few months will help improve it. 

The mouthfeel made the Victory WildDevil unsessionable (because I have to make up at least two or three words in every review).  It is nice experiment gone awry.  A potentially cute girl with lots of pointy elbows.  Spooning a porcupine.  But I digress.

I look forward to Victory’s next brett experiment.  I believe in you, but let’s put this one behind us.

Making beer is like anything else in the world.  You have to do it a lot to get really good at it.  Sure, you can make some fantastic beers right from the start, and your skills evolve even faster if you have the right resources and people to mentor you along.  But being able to make something special on a consistent basis takes a lot of trial and error, and getting used to the quirks of your home brewery.

I brew fairly often and I always aim to brew over 60 gallons a year.  (That is more than most brewers I personally know, but far, far less than the real homebrew addicts.)  Brewing a least once a month is relaxing, cathartic, and it keeps me from getting rusty.  The biggest benefit is getting things very right and very wrong, and learning from them.  If I brew a BJCP style that I’m not really happy with, I make it again.  Maybe not the next month, but usually soon after. 

Given my latest addiction to brewing sour ales, my new dilemma is figuring out how to speed up the feedback loop on beers that take several years to make.  I have a Flanders Red (Stupid Sexy Flanders) Ale that I brewed at the end of May, and it is fermenting away.  I’m pretty excited about trying it out, but it really isn’t going to be ready until May of 2011.  That is a long time to wait for that sort of feedback.  

Was I right to pitch a neutral yeast first?  Should I have just pitched the Roeselare blend from the start?  Did I use an oak with the right degree of toast?  Was the malt bill right?  Were there enough remaining sugars for the brettanomyces to dig into?

And what do I do with the sour beers that I brew in the meantime?  Do I try different methods and ingredients in those batches to contrast?  Because I might have gotten it accidentally “right” the last batch….

So far, I’ve been lucky with the lambics and Berliner Weisses I’ve made, but they can certainly be improved upon.  I have the feeling that I might be splitting some of these batches, in the future, to help accelerate the learnings about these wonderful beers that aren’t all that wonderful for the impatient brewer.

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.)

Ommegang, located in Cooperstown, NY, is a brewery that focuses on Belgian-style ales.  They make a very nice saison (Hennepin), a Belgian dark ale (Rare Vos) and a number of other interesting ales (like the Three Philosophers which is Belgian Quad mixed with Kriek Lambic).  

When I heard about their bière de garde beer that is funkified with brettanomyces, well, I had to check it out.  A bière de garde seems like the perfect base for this sort of souring since the style lays out a nice malt base but has a good bit of sweetness that the wild yeast can slowly eat through.

My bottle was the traditional heavy Ommegang bomber that was caged and corked.  This one was from Batch #2, bottled in October of 2008 and is 6.5% ABV.  The label calls it a “Belgian amber with magical space dust woven in.”  The strain of wild yeast is brettanomyces bruxellensis.
 

This one pours into a goblet a deep, apple juice red.  There is a lot of yeast in this one.  Huge chunks swirl around the glass and stay in suspension for the entire time I drink it.  I’m guessing the space dust turned into a tiny asteroid field.  Being a homebrewer, the chunks don’t bother me, but I am curious about why there is that much sediment.  The head is big and rocky, and it stays around like it is in a contest with the yeast to see who will flinch first. 

The aroma is sour with a relatively light amount of funk.  There is a tiny bit of dry hop spice and lemon, and they peek in from the corners of the barnyard smells.

The taste is acid on the tongue.  The finish is dry, like a saison, with a hint of mint.  The thing that comes to mind the most about this beer is its balance.  There is firm malt and the sourness which is refreshing without becoming that repetitive and pounding one note that a sour ale can become.  

The question I have coming out of this tasting, is should this be cellared?  I suppose it depends upon what you want out of the Bière de Mars.  If you like a pronounced but not overwhelming sourness and slightly sweet balance, find a bottle of this and drink it now.  If you are a sourhead, I’d suggest cellaring this one for a year or so to see how it matures.  This is a heavy-duty corked bottle with tons of living, wild yeast that can keep this beer evolving for quite some time. 

Definitely try this one out.  It is young, but it will grow.

Years ago I read that the Native Americans could not see Christopher Columbus’ ships as they approached the mainland.  The concept being that our minds cannot interpret things that are beyond our experiences and immediate understanding.  As interesting as that is, and as pregnant with metaphor as it may seem, that’s a load of bullshit.

The Indians had the same sense sight and abilities of perception that you and I enjoy.  They could, of course, see the ships, but they may not have understood them to be ships as these mammoth vessels, with huge sails, had little in common with the canoes they used.  They could be seen, but when you walk that close to survival on a daily basis the things that are not immediate threats or sources of food just get ignored.  But surely there is something more to life than that.

But I digress.

The Avery Brabant is the 1^st in their barrel-aged series of beers.  It is classified as a dark, wild ale aged in zinfandel barrels for 8 months.  It was fermented with two strains of wild yeast, otherwise known as brettanomyces, and only 694 cases of this were made and bottled on February 10th, 2009

For those of you not familiar with the world of sour beers, this one is probably not the starting place.  These naturally occurring wild yeasts ferment sugars down more completely than normal beer yeasts, but at a slower pace. Lactic acid producing bacteria like lactobacillus and pediococcus are often used in conjunction with the brettanomyces, as well.  The flavor compounds and aromas that they create are usually an acquired taste.  It is common to hear that these beers have a “barnyard character”, and my personal favorite descriptor is “horse blanket”. 

Still with me?  Good, because this one has lots of horse blanket.  I might goes as far as calling it more of a sweaty horse blanket.  You sourheads know what I am talking about, and the rest of you can read on while you wait for your reverse hysteria to recede.

This one pours a thin, black color, like Coca-Cola.  I poured it vigorously into a large brandy snifter and it went fizzy as the head dissipated until it was a thin line of bubbles around the edge of the glass.

The immediate smell was overwhelmingly horse blanket and vinegar.  After a time, a tiny hint of wood snuck in with some vanilla in its back pocket, but it was hard to pick it up above the horse blanket which was getting a little chaffed and agitated.

The first sip was just like the aroma, but slightly milder.  I took this bottle out of the refrigerator and let it sit on the counter for about 20 minutes before I opened it, and it still seems at bit blunted by coldness.  There was alcohol warming right from the first taste which was a little surprising since this is a big beer, at 8.65% alcohol by volume, but not THAT big.

The more that this warmed up, the more it took on the character of wood and wine.  It seemed to thicken, and there were notes of plum and blackberry.  It became slightly acrid, and it had that absorbing wood dryness.  

Overall, this is a good beer that will probably be amazing in a few years.  It is still young, and it needs to be aged so that the harshness of the sour character diminishes and the background flavors bubble up to the surface.  I have another bottle of this and I look forward to reviewing it in, perhaps, 2011.  But do I have the patience?

If you have never tried a sour beer, I really encourage you to do so.  These usually are not love at first site beers, and I would suggest starting with an Orval before a Monk’s Café or a Rodenbach Grand Cru. 

I know that if I had the Brabant a few years ago, I probably would have poured it out.  It would have been way beyond what I would have expected a beer should be and, frankly, too much of a challenge.  If you feel that way right now, I get that.  Sometimes I don’t want to work too hard on a beer either.  

But if you see the sails of a sour beer come over the horizon, give it a try.  If you don’t like it, then put it down but don’t give up there.  Try it again in a year or so, because there is something more interesting than the beers you know.