Slime Beer (Sick phase)

[ChugachBrewing]

It seems "slightly" less ropy. That being said, its still very, very viscous. I'm hoping that warmer temps will 'get the yeasties excited to eat some munchies'

 

[marvaden]

If not, I wonder if there is an enzyme that will help break the polysaccharides apart that is commercially available.

 

[ChugachBrewing]

I'm all ears if anyone knows of one.

 

[smokinghole]

I haven't done much looking into the exopolysaccharide composition so I don't know the types of bonds that would need to be broken. That would be the way to find out if there's an easy to source enzyme for breaking the bonds. Some are easier than others to hydrolyze depending on which carbon molecules and whether alpha or beta.

I did a gravity check on my high gravity stout like brew. Its still sitting around 1.032 and I brewed back in the summer and racked into the barrel sometime in July. It's still very viscous and suspect my actual gravity to be more like in the 20s. It's sour, roasty, and slightly bitter. It'll be good it's just taking a while. I think I may rack this into a 1/2bbl sanke with a 4" TC top if I can get my hands on a keg and convert it. Then I'll throw a lower gravity brown beer in after this stout.

Anyhow this culture in this stoutish beer is ECY02 and it got ropy. I think I remember reading somewhere that they selected this pedio for its ropy characteristic. Seems weird to me to purposefully choose a bacterium for that characteristic but maybe he knows something I don't. The home assembled culture I have gets PLENTY sour and has no extreme rope issues that i know of. I may dump some of my home culture in with this beer to thin out the rope faster than is typical of an ECY strain. Afterall the ECY cultures are just a baby mixture of single strain isolations compared to a truly wild culture which may contain as many strains of saccharomyces as all the different organisms in an ECY culture combined. I think the single cell isolations and subsequent mixes misses the mark on the cultures on an enzymatic front. They seem to concentrate on flavor attributes but not so much the fermentation strengths of what they're throwing in the mix. More diversity means greater variety of enzymes produced and or different concentrations. So while one brett strain will produce x amount of hydrolyzing enzyme for alpha/beta 1-6 carbon to carbon sugar bond, another strain may produce 10x more of the enzyme making the fermentation move that much faster and reliably but not produce the same flavor and aromatic profile.

 

[Dirty25]

Did you ever try emailing Vinny and asking his opinion? I hear he is really helpful and fourth coming.

 

[ChugachBrewing]

I sent an email through the brewer website... no response. Better ideas/contact info?

thanks for the post smoking hole. i do not know why anyone would intentionally look for ropiness... perhaps it is the next big thing?? =-)

 

[marvaden]

I wonder if it's the ropiness itself that they are going for or what you get when the bonds have been broken. There are a lot of subtle flavors that are in some of the Belgium sour ales that I haven't tasted in the American counterparts. Sometimes I wish that I had gone for bio-chemistry instead of computer science so that I could study these things...

 

[dantheman13]

I sent an email through the brewer website... no response. Better ideas/contact info?

thanks for the post smoking hole. i do not know why anyone would intentionally look for ropiness... perhaps it is the next big thing?? =-)

For Vinnie? I'll PM you his email address if you need it. I contacted him through the RR website, and he got back to me within 2 days! The email was forwarded to him by a sales person. Pretty awesome company.

 

[ChugachBrewing]

The beer is fine and pouring wonderfully now. Just tapped it a couple days ago. I'll have a review on my website soon. Whew.

 

[brewguyver]

Aged out in 6 months, or did you have to do something to get it sorted?


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[ChugachBrewing]

Just gave it time. I put a post on my blog all about it.

 

[smokinghole]

Mine came around too. I ended up adding some of my homemade souring culture to the barrel. It cleaned it up in about a week. I'm getting ready to bottle some and age some on cherries.