Ok to call a sour a failure after 8 months?

[troglodytes]

I've had a lot of great brown sours, and I thought, hey, I make great berliners and goses, I'm going to try my hand at something different. I did research on grain bills and came up with a halfway decent looking recipe and decided to use the second runnings from an APA to do a partial partigyle sour brown (I added enough new ingredients to hit my mash pH, color, OG, etc)

Here's the problem...it's now 8 months in the carboy and it does not taste good. There's just something about the flavor combo of the ingredients (namely the roastiness) that just clashes with my house sour blend (which has sacch, lacto, & pedio). It kind of makes you curl your lips as you drink, as it tastes like sour diner coffee.

After this amount of time I know its still developing and will continue to do so, but if I really just don't like the flavor combo now, I never will, right? I mean I could go wild and add oak, or cherries, or something that would introduce new flavors, but I'd hate to throw good ingredients into a bad beer. Have I given it enough to time to call it a dead experiment and move on?

 

[Cavpilot2000]

Yes, it is okay to call sour beers a failure.
All trends eventually die off when they're not trendy anymore.

 

[Cavpilot2000]

 

[troglodytes]

I don't think I've ever heard someone refer to something like an Oud Bruin as "trendy". Now my barrel-aged sour NEIPA with 3 pounds of Mosaic on the other hand...

 

[RPh_Guy]

You didn't mention ... Did you add Brett? What culture(s)?

I would not recommend trying to cover up distasteful flavors with more ingredients.

Sourness does tend to clash with roastiness. If you just overdid the roast, maybe it could be saved with blending.

 

[troglodytes]

The sour culture I've been using is the one I make my citrusy, summer sours with. It's on its 3rd batch now and originated from Allagash's Coolship dregs, various Nightshift sour dregs, Allagash's brett, Nightshift's brett and the Sacch was WY 1968. LAB and brett was pitched straight away at about 85F in 4.5pH wort, left to cool down to 70F and sacch was pitched about 24 hours afterwards.

It was a slow and steady fermentation that has seemed to stall at about 1.010 from 1.040. Haven't checked the pH recently, but it is quite sour.

 

[505-Brewer]

You didn't mention ... Did you add Brett? What culture(s)?

I would not recommend trying to cover up distasteful flavors with more ingredients.

Sourness does tend to clash with roastiness. If you just overdid the roast, maybe it could be saved with blending.

Agreed. Go buy a 6 pack of a brown ale and try some blending. If the weirdness goes away then you know you can brew up a beer and blend it. Its very rare to have a traditionally made sour beer that doesn’t need blending.....

 

[cactusgarrett]

maybe it could be saved with blending.

I was going to suggest just this. There's a difference between a "bad" beer and one you're not particularly fond of. Bad beers can't be saved by adding more layers. Blending with something on the other end of the spectrum to find a happy medium might be your best recourse.

 

[mashpaddled]

Drying out and souring a beer with a lot of highly roasted malt can highlight the acrid notes in those specialty malts because you've removed any balancing sugars and sourness seems to enhance the impression of acridity. What grains did you add to the APA recipe for the sour portion?

You may never like this beer but I think eight months is too young to make that decision. Like all dark beers, some of the acrid notes will roll off and the beer may smooth out with time into something you like. Sometimes mixed fermentation beers also go through weird phases with highly roasted malts. It's not uncommon to go through a phase where the beer tastes like a car tire or smells like burning rubber. It usually goes away.

 

[troglodytes]

What grains did you add to the APA recipe for the sour portion?

I used the remaining sugars from the APA and added the following in a second mash to get to my SG of 1.040

1# 2-row
.5# Munich
.5# Carapils
2 oz Crystal 15L
2 oz Roasted Barley

I'm going to keep aging and try blending to see what I can get. Definitely not getting and burning rubber/bandaid/etc flavor at all. It may be salvageable given some time and blending.

 

[isomerization]

If you go the blending route, I’d recommend a golden/blonde ale (rather than a less roasty darker beer) this should give you a broader dynamic range to play with.

Did you say what your pH is? You can also try and target a final pH by upping (or dropping) IBUs in the 2nd batch.

 

[troglodytes]

So I just recently got a pH meter, the pH is down to 3.1. My most recent taste has actually changed a bit from a month ago. The roast has faded substantially, the higher FG (still 1.010) makes it feel far less sour than the pH would indicate, and it is very thin tasting.

It may have just been in a bad stage previously as I can now see keeping it to see what comes of it. I guess the answer to my questing is... 8 months is too short to judge. I wish I had done oak now because it needs some mouthfeel, an with the roast flavors faded it lacks any comped character, which is surprising due to how much sugar is left in it, I'm assuming from the roasted grains

 

[isomerization]

You can always add oak (consider using a bag so you can pull it and keep aging if you want).

 

[millsbrew]

I’d try a little bit of oak before blending personally. Reason being is that unless you can keg your sours, I’d worry about bottle bombs from blending. Plus an ounce of oak is way cheaper than 5g of brew.

 

[estricklin]

I would not give up on it after 8 months, just too young. This could turn out to b great, I've had this very thing happen to me before many times in brewing. I've also had a sour that was completely undrinkable after 6 months, and after a year was truly amazing, and won me some medals.