1st Sour ale bottle advice

Brewed a la folie clone recipe 6 months ago. Forgot about it until last night I opened a russian river supplication and decided to try it out. It tastes amazing! Drinkable without carbonation! It is a little lighter in color maybe because of partial mash.
It never really formed a pellicle. It seemed to for about a week then I woke up one day and it was gone. It has a great sour to it but not over powering. Very balanced with a touch of brett in the back. Used WLP655, 1056, and WLP brett.

Anyway my question is should I bottle it now that it is sour enough? Ive never bottled a sour before.
And when bottling sours do I use the same amount of corn sugar as normal?
Should I buy some wood chunks and add them in for a few weeks then bottle?

Any advice appreciated!

Have you taken a gravity reading recently? 6 months is still pretty young for a Flanders Red (the bulk of La Folie is aged for 2 years before blending and bottling). There is likely still some fermentation going on that could lead to over carbonation.

You can add some oak for awhile before bottling, less for longer gets better results in my experience. I'd add an ounce of oak cubes (medium toast French preferred) and let it sit for another 6 months before bottling.

When you do bottle it you should bottle it just like any other beer, although you might want to add a bit of fresh yeast to ensure rapid carbonation.

Took the OG at 1.06 now its at 1.010. The target final gravity was 1.015 so its pretty low! I will get some oak and let it go for a bit longer and see if the gravity changes.

Should I boil off the oak and/or soak them in pinot noir or folie or something?

And as far as adding fresh yeast to bottle should I add 1056 or some brett or does it even matter?

Thanks!

BTW had a half glass this stuff is gunna be great!!

1.010 isn't that low for a sour beer, most of mine end up between 1.002 and 1.008, it certainly could drop another few points.

I usually boil the oak for a few minutes, just to remove some of the harsh/fresh oak notes. Sometimes I soak the cubes, but unless you are going to do it for a few weeks you might as well just add the wine/spirit to the beer directly.

I tend to use wine yeast since they are more alcohol/acid tolerant than ale yeast, but 1056 or Brett would do fine as well.

mattyp1214 said:

Took the OG at 1.06 now its at 1.010. The target final gravity was 1.015 so its pretty low! I will get some oak and let it go for a bit longer and see if the gravity changes.
!

Click to expand...

I bet it will drop a few more points. Brett is slow, but strong
And a pellicle is formed when there is some interaction between the bugs and oxygen, so if there isn't any O2, no Pellicle,,,,,,,
or at least that's my understanding of it

Yeah some people reported no pellicle at all. And mine definitely has a brett funk so there probably just wasn't enough O2 to form it, which is fine with me as long as it does its job.

you def have to wait to bottle. since you've already waited this long, just put in the extra few months to make that baby really good. and the pellicle is def weird, my theory is it takes some extraneous factor. i've read on here and correlate the addition of oak cubes/chips many times to giving the extra nutrients or O2 for the pellicle to show up. i have a few sours under my belt and the only one to get the pellicle was when i reracked onto cherries. i bet you add the oak, it forms a pellicle and goes on to drop at least 2 more gravity points.

I would let that beer sit another year or so and it will be that much better. All my lambics have sat at least 2 years (in the bottle, 1 in the carboy) before sampling and they are great.

mattyp1214 said:

Brewed a la folie clone recipe 6 months ago. Forgot about it until last night I opened a russian river supplication and decided to try it out. It tastes amazing! Drinkable without carbonation! It is a little lighter in color maybe because of partial mash.
It never really formed a pellicle. It seemed to for about a week then I woke up one day and it was gone. It has a great sour to it but not over powering. Very balanced with a touch of brett in the back. Used WLP655, 1056, and WLP brett.

Anyway my question is should I bottle it now that it is sour enough? Ive never bottled a sour before.
And when bottling sours do I use the same amount of corn sugar as normal?
Should I buy some wood chunks and add them in for a few weeks then bottle?

Any advice appreciated!

Click to expand...

Will you post the recipe? thanks man.

La Folie clone
(New Belgium Brewing Company)
(5 gallons/19 L, all-grain)
OG = 1.062 FG = 1.015 (or lower)
IBU = 20 SRM = 17 ABV = 6.0%
“Never turn your back on (the barrels). They like to change on you and right when you think you know what one will do, it does the exact opposite.”
—Lauren Salazar

Ingredients

9.75 lbs. (4.4 kg) 2-row pale malt
1 lb. 5 oz. (0.60 kg) Munich malt
1 lb. 5 oz. (0.60 kg) crystal malt (60 °L)
10 oz. (0.28 kg) unmalted wheat
5.7 AAU Cantillion Iris hops (60 mins) (or any neutral hop)
(1.9 oz./54 g at 3% alpha acids)
Wyeast 1056 (American Ale), White Labs WLP001 (California Ale),
Fermentis Safale US-05 or Danstar Nottingham yeast
Wyeast 3278 (Lambic blend) or
White Labs WLP655 (Belgian Sour Mix 1) blend
1 cup corn sugar (for priming)

Step by Step

Mash at 154 °F (68 °C). Boil for 60 minutes. Ferment with neutral ale yeast at 75 °F (24 °C), then rack to barrel and add sour blend. Aging time is totally up to the barrel. This is where years of tasting and blending come in handy. If you want to blend, try ~ 20% of a sweeter (younger) barrel, ~30% of a nice mild sour barrel and ~50% of a well established “tour gripper” with nice oak notes (cherries, horse blanket, etc). (Young usually means ~ 1 year, mid range ~2 years and grippers are 3+ years.) But there are no rules here. Do whatever works for you.

Extract Option

Omit 2-row pale malt. Add 1 lb. 14 oz. (0.85 kg) dried malt extract and 4 lb. 10 oz. liquid malt extract. Steep in 4.8 qts. (4.6 L) of water at 154 °F (68 °C) for 45 minutes. Rinse with 2.4 qts. (2.3 L) of water at 170 °F (77 °C). Add water to make 3 gallons (11 L), add dried malt extract and bring to a boil. Boil for 60 minutes, stirring in LME at end of boil.

i used extract option pilsen liquid malt and czech saaz hops

I'm thinking about doing a La Folie clone and I'm wondering which WLP Brett strain you used in addition to the 655? Also, did you pitch all three yeasts at the beginning or did you pitch the sour during/after primary fermentation?

I pitched 1056 initially and about 5 days? later I pitched WLP 655. Its been 10 months and tastes pretty ridiculous. I used the partial mash recipe from byo, but I think I substituted saaz for the hops. I added medium toast french oak about 3 months ago after boiling them off for a few minutes about 1.5 oz. small cubes. It was a little too oakey at first but has rounded out very well. I started it in a bucket then moved to a carboy 6 gal with a standard airlock. The whole oxygen thing is a little exaggerated in my opinion because mine has a perfect sourness comparable to New Belgiums Eric's ale if you've tried that before. I know mad fermentationalist has great luck with better bottles too though.

Next step for me is bottling I'm a little nervous about it since its so good I don't want to mess it up (that is unless I keep taking tasters out and drink it all).

Honestly I think I had some good luck because it is coming along better than some sour beers I've tasted on the market. I'm obsessed with sours and honestly in the future will probably be brewing mostly sours and brett beers.
Anyway if you need any help or have any questions in the future feel free to ask!

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-

As long as it's below 1.010 you should be fine bottling with an alcohol tolerant yeast. Russian River uses Rockpile for it's neutrality (I don't really like some of the dry champagne yeasts out there). Be sure to add a bit more sugar than the calculators tell you to because your sour ale will be as still as wine after a year.

I would think with Rockpile and a pitching rate below 3 million per mL you shouldn't have any concerns about altering the character of your beer.