Hey, if it’s GABF weekend that must mean I’m at home, by myself. Screw it, I’m brewing.
Porter’s been on my mind lately, since my buddy Greg and I have been extolling its virtues as the temperature drops and darkness comes a little earlier each night. Given those parameters, one of the beautiful things about living in Minnesota is that porter season lasts about 9 months. Continue reading
Sitting over coffee and prepping notes for a talk on sour beers for Better Beer Society University, I have mixed-culture fermentations on the brain and some raw materials to work with.
Raw material #1: Last summer I racked a nice, clean red ale base beer into an oak barrel and inoculated it with Wyeast’s Roeselare blend; 13 months on, it’s ready for … something. Cherries? Blending? Straight-up bottling? Whatever its fate, I need some fresh wort to fill that buggy barrel no matter what.
Raw material #2: Earlier this year a Brewing TV viewer provided some friends and I with a washed Brett culture from a bottle of Russian River Sanctification. So I got that going for me, which is nice.
Raw material #3: a couple pounds of frozen-ass Chernaya Lisovenko blackcurrants from Mary Dirtyface Farm. So I got that going for me, which is nice.
All this can only mean one thing: it’s about to get acidic up in this piece.
The plan: 10 gallons of base beer, split half and half between the to-be-emptied barrel and the Sanctification Brett and the blackcurrants (Russian River, Russian fruit – I love symmetry). Do something cool with the 2011 ale from the oak … I’d tell you now, but then I’d have to get you blackout drunk so you wouldn’t remember.
Recipe deets below, brew day to follow. Stay tuned.
Basecamp Sour 2012
Targets: OG 1.052, 7 SRM, 18 IBU
Grist
Simple is good …
Mash: Flemish Sour regimen
… but complex is sometimes necessary. A high-temp alpha sacch’ rest will create plenty dextrin for the Brett to chomp on. Truth in advertising: I’m using up a stock of shamefully old undermodified Pils malt with this mash, elsewise the lack of unmalted adjunct grain would arguably make the 122F rest unnecessary for what these beers are going to be.
Boil
Fermentation
Biere de Garde: criminally underappreciated. Clean but rustic, Bock and saison had a baby and they called it French farmhouse ale. This is my 5 gallon stab at the pale end of the style with honeyed malt and flashes of biscuit, hop spice, and flowers that takes on musty undertones when cellared in corked bottles.
Biere d’Avril
Blonde biere de garde
5 gallons, all-grain
OG: 1.078 FG: 1.012
Grist:
Mash:
Boil:
Fermentation:
the beer engine 