sour beer startup sanity check
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I've got Brett C, WLP655 (Belgian Sour Mix 1), and numerous Belgian yeast varieties. I have a starter of Wyeast 3724 (Belgian Saison) in the works that is almost done.
Some things I want to try, even on the first attempt if possible, are a Grand Cru, Flanders Red, Oud Bruin, and something to make use of sour cherries. The cherry part could be any beers listed above or something else, but most importantly something kind of epic and/or sour.
I have been thinking about building one base beer using the Wyeast 3724 starter in my 6.5G carboy, and fermenting it between 80F and 85F. When the beer was approaching 2/3 to 3/4 completion in primary, to rack the beer over to a couple of 3G carboys. In these carboys, one would be inoculated with the Belgian Sour Mix 1, and the other brett C. These 3G carboys would be plugged with oak bungs/pegs, and left to sit in a room temperature environment for months and months undisturbed.
The intention with these is to repeat these beers again in the future, 8 months to a year and a half down the road. Instead of pitching yeast into the virgin wort, I would instead rack the fresh wort directly into each 3G carboy (after racking the aged sour beers into other carboys or kegs) onto the old bacteria trub cakes with newly introduced fresh Saccharomyces , in hopes that this will create a 2nd more sour/tart beer. After these settle down and pellicle's fall, in theory I would have 2x 3gallon carboys of first generation sour beers and 2x 3gallon carboys of second generation more sour beers, and could blend them as needed.
Am I wrong in thinking that I can ultimately end up with a few different kinds of beer using one base beer, one yeast strain and two different packages of bacteria, done twice over a year or two? If not, I wont be worried, as a lot of this is just seeing and tasting what the differences will be between these two bacteria mixes with a lot of time thrown in to age.
Thoughts? Maybe we would make a 11G batch to begin with and split it 4 ways to further use the cherries and different yeast strains? How would you split 4 experiments so we could have four things happening over the next two years?
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I have been thinking about getting some 3 gallon carboys for fruiting my sours. I do 10 gallon batchs, and age in 5 gallon carboys. I would like to split a 5 gallon batch into 2.5 unfruited and 2.5 fruited. They sell 3 gallon pet and 3 gallon glass. Since you are going for a wild brew, I would go with glass.
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