Sour beer question.

Howdy,

I will be attempting my first sour beer and I have a few questions that I am hoping can be answered.

1st. I plan to ferment with 3711 for about 2 days then pitch roesalare blend. How long can this sit in primary? 1-3 months? or should I rack to secondary after ~10 days.

2nd. I am thinking of using waterless airlock or wood plug after majority of fermentation action has subsided. Should this help get the desired effect? I plan to age for about 15 months.

Thanks

IMHO you still want to keep bugs in the air out. From what I've read, there area lot of nasty bugs in the air that wouldn't be any good for your beer. When commercial breweries make sour beers, they are not introducing any unknown bugs to the party, even when they aren't innoculating the wort from a test tube.

That being said, once the primary fermentation has taken place, there isn't much floating around in the air that could mess up your brew, but I'd think if nothing else you'd want an airlock just to keep it all from evaporating away, especially if you let it sit for months or years.

Happy brewing!

I agree with binkman about the airlock. As far as your first question, your approach sounds good. You can let it sit in primary for quite a long time (a few months, easy) if you like.

You might want to toss this over into the sour and lambic thread to get more response. Oldsock, IIRC, has played with wood dowels so he would probably have some good advice on that. However, you will want some sort of air barrier, no open airlocks as that is too much oxygen and a fast way to end up with a batch of vinegar.

Here is my concern with your using 3711, it is almost a bug in of itself in that it will tear down so much sugar so fast that you will have very little for the bugs to chew on. But, I haven't used Rosalare blend so I don't know specifics, but it should be pretty much GTG without additional yeast.