Yeah, i'm getting to the point where sours are all I'm really interested in. I do have a non (rather extremely mild) sour version of a dark farmhouse that I really, really like. I repitched the oak from an earlier farmhouse that had jolly pumpkin Bam Noir dregs in the secondary. That second batch was much better than the first (I think the bugs had started to adapt to their new home). So my plan is to oak (at least in a small way) and repitch the cubes to maintain consistency of character in my sours (the ones I like anyway).
I did a (roeselare) brown in glass and secondaried it in a corny and it turned out terribly, the temps were perfect but I made some assumptions about available oxygen that I think turned out to be woefully short, it's got a tiny bit of the classic sour cherry but a large helping what smells like the bathroom at Shea stadium... Not to mention that it's not nearly as sour (after more than a year) as I was hoping. I'm still debating between bucket and the better bottle.
I hear that starting the bugs when there's still some easy sugar left to ferment but with all the oxygen scrubbed out helps the acid-producers in their growth phase and achieves sourness quicker. Then, down the line, as oxygen seeps in and brett controls it with the pellicle, the anaerobic bugs already have a stable population and brett is controlling and metabolizing most of the present oxygen, so you end up with healthy concurrent populations. Additionally, according the slides at the brettanomyces masters project, brett really seems to like growing on top of healthy saccharomyces colonies. Until I find a reason to shoot for something different I'm going to keep pitching all of my bugs in the latter third of primary fermentation.
One obstacle I'm running into is how to get the oak involved as home for all my critters at the oxygen interface. I know about the wood dowel technique, but it seems a little silly, plus I'm not sure I could find a good medium-toast French oak chair leg... I guess I'm imagining cutting the top off of a sanke keg and clamping the top of a used barrel onto it, the trick would be keeping a small reservoir above the wood to keep it topped off.
Anyway, thanks for sharing the experience with this beer, it confirms a lot of suspicions I plan on acting on in the near future-
|
Linear Mode
