Jsta Porter

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Hello,

How do you determine FG of a wild brew? I understanding, or misunderstanding is that some bugs will chew on sugars that a standard yeast will not be capable of hitting and that they can work very slowly. So, how do you determine FG? How do you prevent bottlebombs? If you blend it with a standard beer do you have to give it time to hit all of the fermentables that the standard yeasts were incapable of hitting?

Thanks!

brewmonger

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You are going to want to be careful if you are blending it with a standard beer. The dextrins and other non-fermentables (left by ordinary yeast) in the standard could be eaten slowly by the wild organisms present in the lambic, and create bottle bombs like you say. That is, unless the standard beer is pretty thin and doesn't have much of that stuff left (say a Final Gravity of less than 1.010)

I'm guessing that a wild brew should probably reach a specific gravity of at least 1.000 (if not lower) before bottling. I am aging my first one right now, so we'll see how that goes. However, I think most blending of lambics takes place after they have been aged for a while, and is usually a blend of more than one wild brews, not a wild and a standard.

I could be wrong, however.

ericd

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You have do just let them do their thing and take gravity readings. It's done when they stop lowering. If you just use a wild strain of cervesomyces the attenuation will be around 75% like for reg. beer yeast. Once you get other stuff in there however you really just have to let it go until it stops. That's wild brewing.

brewmonger

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From what I understand, a wild brew can continue to change and evolve even well after the Specific gravity has stopped changing. Generally speaking, it will reach around 1.000, unless it is re-sweetened with sugar or fruit prior to bottling (like Lindeman's).

Also, I suspect its going to be very hard to only catch one type of wild yeast, (unless you isolate it on a petri dish and culture it from that). Even though a wild Sachromyces Cervasia (sp?) may be dominant early on in the brew, it is almost inevitable that there will be other bugs present that will take weeks or months to begin multiplying and expressing themselves.

Jolly McStanson

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Hey you know? One of us may be in an area that has a yeast that will work miracles. Sene Vally in Belgium has the the lambic thing. How about sour dough bread from San Francisco. The wild yeast in that area do there thing on the bread dough .

Are you the next one to change the brewing world?

__________________
Ingredients waiting to be brewed: nothing
Primary:
Kegged: half of something from last Spring
Kegged: half of something from last Spring
Kegged: half of something from last Spring

Jsta Porter

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Thanks All!

I have pinged a few other local brewers, and their take was similar.

Many thanks!