First time sour experiment

So I brewed an english pale ale that I added a bottle of Lyle's Golden Syrup, and the beer came out as 8% and had a thick and syrupy taste/mouthfeel. Luckily the FG is really close to what the book American Sour Beers suggest to use as a sour base.

My idea was to take 2-3 gallons out of the 5 gallons, top with water to make a regular session ale, then put about a gallon of beer into gallon growlers to experiment with different microbes. So far I have the following ideas of dosing my jugs:

• Orval Dreggs
• Jolly Pumpkin La Roja
• Some Flanders Red (most likley Monk's Cafe) with Rasberries and maybe oak cubes

Am I somehow forgetting something that won't allow me to do this? Has anyone done something like this as well with small one gallon batches?

 

Well if the beer is already 8% ABV most lacto species are going to struggle with substantial acidification. However I have heard JP dregs are pretty vicious so you may be okay there. Brett on the other hand is pretty alcohol tolerant, so you could potentially see some interesting results from it.

Go for it!

 

As far as the sour portion: That's a great idea. Orval and JP dregs are fantastic. But I think Monk's Cafe is pasteurized/filtered, so you might not want to use that. I always refer to Mike's list of beers with viable dregs:

http://www.themadfermentationist.com/p/dreg-list.html

As for the clean portion: You're going to introduce a ton of oxygen into your beer by adding water after fermentation. It will oxidize and taste pretty crummy after a period of time. You might instead consider brewing a very small beer and blending it with the big boy.

 

The other idea was I have citrus trees in my backyard and may see if I can obtain some wild yeast from the fruit, but unsure if I want to put that much work into this little experiment when I can just pitch some bottle dregs.

 

Yeah, it's on there, but I have heard conflicting stories. I'm on that website constantly looking at the back articles to get some info. As for the clean, i didn't think about that. I mean, I have 6-7 growlers (one from each of the breweries in town) so i could just turn the entire batch into different sours adding spices, fruit, etc. Just trying to limit my imagination on this because otherwise it will get a little out of control.

 

Hahaha...looks like you've got some choices to make. Wild yeast from fruit can yield some very interesting results. And some terrible ones. As long as you're prepared for either.

On the clean portion...I suppose you could boil and cool the water to take some of the oxygen out. You'd have to rack it into the beer, to avoid splashing. It certainly won't be ideal but if you drink it all up quickly, oxidation might be less of an issue. Could be an interesting experiment on it's own.

 

I've successfully used Monks Cafe dregs. First sour I did used it, and it came out great.

Boiling water should remove most of the O2. If it were me, I think I would add some sugar to scrub some of the O2 out.

 

Yeah, we have orange, satsuma (like a tangerine), lemon, and fig trees in my yard, so I feel like I would definitely be able to get something, the only question is whether it would make good beer or not.

 

Where I lived in AZ for a couple of years it was all citrus orchards. In the spring when the blossoms bloomed I put a bit of wort with cheese cloth underneath the tree one evening when it was cool. The wort began fermenting the next day, it had a spicy bubblegum smell. I used that to inoculate a some worth with ecy19 for a "lambic". I would say you for sure could get some yeasts.

 

What yeast did you use for the clean? I've added hungrier strains at this point to knock a few gravity points off and change a syrupy beer to a proper one.

 

WLP002 English Ale Yeast. When you did that, did the mouthfeel change from syrupy to medium? Thats my main problem with the current beer.

 

I had an English Barleywine on WY1318 that fermented down to 1.028 or so. It was really good, just a bit cloying. When I added a second yeast that attenuates better than 1318, it dropped about 6 points and ended up right where I wanted. I would add whatever yeast you have that you don't have to go buy--anything will out-attenuate 002--and see how you like the result. Whatever sugars get eaten in this process will probably be ones that affect the mouthfeel more than the taste, which sounds like what you're after.