First sour...length of aging in secondary?

I'm on my first sour! It's a blackberry lambic.

I started with an extract wheat beer, then added 7lbs of frozen blackberries (that I picked!) as well as a culture starter (started 2 days prior) of the liquid Belgian Sour Mix (brett) and a liquid vial of lacto. After like a week or so of that the fermentation calmed down and I transferred it to a secondary where it remains in the corner of my kitchen, fluctuating between 60F and 70F.

How long should I keep it in this glass carboy secondary before bottling? Guys at the beer store were recommending 6mo bare minimum, and a full year if I could hold off.

I definitely agree. You are purposefully infecting your beer, and it takes along time for the flavors to mellow out into something drinkable, especially if you didnt ferment with a normal yeast strain first. Thats alot of funk.

General rule of thumb for a lambic is 1-3 years. I may have misunderstood your process, but did you add the blackberries with your sacch/microbes in primary prior to transferring to secondary?

I'm not sure I understand the desire to do "secondary" with sours. Let it sit on the cake and dont disturb the pellicle. 1 year minimum, forget about it until then.

t0rin0 said:

I'm not sure I understand the desire to do "secondary" with sours. Let it sit on the cake and dont disturb the pellicle. 1 year minimum, forget about it until then.

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Leaving it on the cake tends to produce more brett funk. Taking it off the cake should produce a beer that is less funky. Lambic is normally aged on the cake but other sours usually are not.

To the OP -- you should give that beer at least a year.

t0rin0 said:

I'm not sure I understand the desire to do "secondary" with sours. Let it sit on the cake and dont disturb the pellicle. 1 year minimum, forget about it until then.

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Unless it is as it seems and he fermented first with Sacc. and is now fermenting with brett and lacto. I would pull off of the sacc. as well to put on fruit and funky yeasts.

Don't understand the desire to leave on a sacc. cake for a year.

suprchunk said:

Unless it is as it seems and he fermented first with Sacc. and is now fermenting with brett and lacto. I would pull off of the sacc. as well to put on fruit and funky yeasts.

Don't understand the desire to leave on a sacc. cake for a year.

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The way I understand it the brett eats the sacc, but for me the bigger issue is destroying the pellicle.

The one year advice seems to be the rule of thumb, but I'd day bottle when it tastes good. I wouldn't take a sample till about the six month mark, but if the gravity's stable and the flavor is what you want then you're good to go.

I have a theory I've been working on that is to help get a fast sour I mash low and pitch very active bugs up front. So far in the two I've done they were decent at around 5 months and real good at 8. Both had jolly pumpkin dregs which are real aggressive, not sure if the wy/wl bugs or Belgian dregs would do the same.

pohldogg said:

The one year advice seems to be the rule of thumb, but I'd day bottle when it tastes good. I wouldn't take a sample till about the six month mark, but if the gravity's stable and the flavor is what you want then you're good to go.

I have a theory I've been working on that is to help get a fast sour I mash low and pitch very active bugs up front. So far in the two I've done they were decent at around 5 months and real good at 8. Both had jolly pumpkin dregs which are real aggressive, not sure if the wy/wl bugs or Belgian dregs would do the same.

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1 year is generally the minimum. It's similar to smoking meat for 16 hours rather than microwaving it, you "can" do it quicker, buy why?

There are a variety of ways to easily make a quick sour (sour mash, lactic acid, etc), but none of these methods is going to produce the complexity that makes sours/lambics so interesting. Patience, letting the microbes work slowly over time, is what makes these beers unique and delicious.

I don't think what I've been trying is the brewing version of the microwaved steak. I just have a hunch that the reason some of these wilds take so long to develop is the high proportion of dextrins and low population of bugs. By mashing lower and pitching lots of bugs early I'm finding the complex flavors arrive earlier. I'm not trying to replace traditional lambic brewing, but develop an alternative that's better than sour mashing.

I think I'll move this to it's own thread to stop the hijack.

t0rin0 said:

I'm not sure I understand the desire to do "secondary" with sours. Let it sit on the cake and dont disturb the pellicle. 1 year minimum, forget about it until then.

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obviously you can do anything, but lambics traditionally stay on the cake from what i recall..

i only yank sours off the cake if i'm putting it on something, in something or want to clarify for a while before bottling.

jtakacs said:

obviously you can do anything, but lambics traditionally stay on the cake from what i recall..

i only yank sours off the cake if i'm putting it on something, in something or want to clarify for a while before bottling.

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Have you had any luck clarifying a sour? The only 2 clear sours I've ever had were my first batch which used no wheat and a bottle of Beersel Oude Gueuze that I opened last night (all the other Beersels have been at least a little bit hazy). It's not even that important to me but I'm curious now.

two; sour belgian blonde made flanders style except with a sour mash and a sour wheat which was an american wheat with RRB dregs... my oud bruin is cloudy right now, but it's still in a barrel and will get racked to (hopefully) clarify.

for me i've had my best luck clarifying any beer by putting it in the coldest spot in the fridge for a couple of weeks before cracking a bottle. granted i don't worry about clarity too much tho.

also my two berliners are the clearest beer i've ever seen and they're 30% wheat.

My lambic is the clearest beer I've ever made. Crystal clear.

thanks everyone for the feedback!

What I did was first make just a normal wheat beer, 7lbs of wheat malt extract with normal beer yeast and then waited liked 4 days until that fermented out. Then I added 7lbs of blackberries and dumped in the half gallon starter that contained the brett and lacto buggies. Then after some time of that I racked off the cake, which I guess might have been a mistake but too late now. Now it'll sit there for a long time in my kitchen, bugging my wife .