winterparkmg
Active Member
So my buddy and I made a Trippel a few weeks ago with the intent of making Revvy's BW afterwards. We ran out of time. So we had all this 2 row and pale malt grain left over with intentions of making a second running of that and the BW grain bill for a monster brew.
We put the grain in a trash bag and threw it in a fridge for two days to resume our plans.
Barleywine brewing day went very long, so I just threw the grains in my LT, poured a ton of ~170 water on it, and drove home with it in the trunk. 4-5 hours later as it sat in the garage, I opened the valve and let it drain in a bucket we'd been using all day, just rinsed, never sanitized. I forgot about it draining, so an hour or better later I went back to the garage, threw a lid on it and brought it to the swamp-tub.
Never had an airlock on the thing. A few days go by and I'm thinking, I should taste it to see at least if the wort is halfway decent and worth me boiling. SO SOUR. Holy cow, that's sour. Can barely swallow. I said the heck with it, maybe I'll just throw and airlock on it and get the courage to boil it up with some hops or something. Gravity was only 1.014...
I put the bucket in our closet (my SWMBO is awesome - pregnant and never even complained about the smelly beer), and I noticed the water levels were off in the airlock. I open the bucket and it sounds like a soda just fizzing away!!!
No boil, no yeast pitched, just old grains rinsed out and primaried!!! Awesome.
So today (~ 3 weeks later), I go to the LHBS and buy 6 pounds of Muntons DME to raise the gravity and make this an actual beer. I boiled it up in about a gallon and a half with a half ounce of cascades from the BW and a half of something else for about half an hour... cooled in the keg and checked again on the zombie beer. Very nice pellicle! So I filled the keg up with the now sour beer (finished the primary at 1.004!) and I'm going to let that sit in the keg for a year. OG of this blend ended up being 1.062, so I'm hoping since I pulled the beer from the bottom and swirled the racking cane about that I'll get a ton of sour yeast (lacto from the grains?) to go to town on my DME addition over the next year.
I know that there is little science and little to no chance of replication here for me, but I figured since I'd otherwise probably never try lambics and this one fell into my lap, that I'd give it a go and just see what happens. If it doesn't ferment well, I'll throw some US 05 into it with a pound of cherries when I come back to the states next year. I'm not going to even get close to tapping this guy for three years. I think this is going to be either fun, or maybe a horrible experiment gone wrong and I'll never want to make another lambic...
This is a lambic, right?
I love brewing...:rockin:
~Wm
We put the grain in a trash bag and threw it in a fridge for two days to resume our plans.
Barleywine brewing day went very long, so I just threw the grains in my LT, poured a ton of ~170 water on it, and drove home with it in the trunk. 4-5 hours later as it sat in the garage, I opened the valve and let it drain in a bucket we'd been using all day, just rinsed, never sanitized. I forgot about it draining, so an hour or better later I went back to the garage, threw a lid on it and brought it to the swamp-tub.
Never had an airlock on the thing. A few days go by and I'm thinking, I should taste it to see at least if the wort is halfway decent and worth me boiling. SO SOUR. Holy cow, that's sour. Can barely swallow. I said the heck with it, maybe I'll just throw and airlock on it and get the courage to boil it up with some hops or something. Gravity was only 1.014...
I put the bucket in our closet (my SWMBO is awesome - pregnant and never even complained about the smelly beer), and I noticed the water levels were off in the airlock. I open the bucket and it sounds like a soda just fizzing away!!!
No boil, no yeast pitched, just old grains rinsed out and primaried!!! Awesome.
So today (~ 3 weeks later), I go to the LHBS and buy 6 pounds of Muntons DME to raise the gravity and make this an actual beer. I boiled it up in about a gallon and a half with a half ounce of cascades from the BW and a half of something else for about half an hour... cooled in the keg and checked again on the zombie beer. Very nice pellicle! So I filled the keg up with the now sour beer (finished the primary at 1.004!) and I'm going to let that sit in the keg for a year. OG of this blend ended up being 1.062, so I'm hoping since I pulled the beer from the bottom and swirled the racking cane about that I'll get a ton of sour yeast (lacto from the grains?) to go to town on my DME addition over the next year.
I know that there is little science and little to no chance of replication here for me, but I figured since I'd otherwise probably never try lambics and this one fell into my lap, that I'd give it a go and just see what happens. If it doesn't ferment well, I'll throw some US 05 into it with a pound of cherries when I come back to the states next year. I'm not going to even get close to tapping this guy for three years. I think this is going to be either fun, or maybe a horrible experiment gone wrong and I'll never want to make another lambic...
This is a lambic, right?
I love brewing...:rockin:
~Wm