'Tis the Saison for Blending (Seasonality & my Sour Program)

[goodolarchie]

After doing this for a several years I've gotten a routine tri-seasonality to my "sour program" that I thought I'd share. I'm just above halfway to the North Pole (45th parallel latitude).

Year Round Tasks:
Sampling barrels is roughly a monthly activity. I take notes, do measurements, dump and steam a barrel if anything is bad. It happens!
Topping off barrels, feeding cultures are quarterly activities. I always keep some beer in stainless ready to donate to barrels -- the angels can take more share than you might think.

November - March: Wort production
Groundwater is cold, ambient overnight temps are favorable for spontaneous koelschip innoculation. It's also cold as hell so why not spend your time brewing!
I need enough volume of young beer to replace what I intend to take out of the aging vessels in the next stage. That means 3-4x 20gallon batches for me.
Occasionally I am pulling 5 gallons off here and there to do some simple, clean saisons to put on draft. I love a nice crisp saison in the winter.
I'm also experimenting with novel yeast and bacteria strains to see what I might want to put into the "mainline" - the bigger barrels and any new vessels.
For every other style, brew day is the exciting part. For sour beer making, it's the most boring. I'm just a wort factory.

March - Early June: Blending and Transferring
While sampling is a year round duty, this is a special time of year where the beers/barrels are deemed ready will advance into blending, or be earmarked for fruit secondary fermentations.
This is a BUSY time in the cellar. I have quite a few barrels, and as each is drawn from, young beer (via above) needs to be ready to go into any Solera style barrels.
I may brew the occasional batch of young saison/lambic beer here, but mostly I'm brewing lagers and light ales for the summer, maybe a grisette.

Each year I do a Cuvée du Printemps, I'll prepare a few growlers, kegs etc. and invite a few friends and brewers to help me create one master blend and note which smaller blends might work well for fruit. I'm actually doing it on the 30th this year thanks to vaccinations! Last year it was just me, thanks to COVID.
This is easily the most favorite time with my program, sharing the mature and young base beer with friends, and opening a few of last year's 750's during the blossoming spring is just heaven.

June - Mid Sept: Secondary on Fruit, Bottling
I live in an orchard county... fresh fruit is our bounty, and there's no comparing to beautiful whole fresh fruit at its peak ripeness. I take full advantage of this!
I work with my neighborhood orchardists, as well as my own hobby orchard of 18 stonefruits to acquire hundreds of pounds of fruit each year. I need to keep on top of the harvest calendars as it's on me to message them and ask for xy pounds of abc fruit and arrange to pick them up. My trees are not fully mature, so I am always supplementing what I buy, by freezing the commercial fruit until mine is at peak ripeness on the tree.
I rinse and process the fruit, but I don't sanitize it.
I pitch fresh brettanomyces (possibly something new that complements the fruit) and allow for anywhere between a 2 week to 2 month maceration on the fruit before bottling.
My bottling routine is typically racking the beer to a clean keg that has dextrose primed to ~3.5 volumes and my favorite bottling house sacch+brett culture. I like to know that oxygen uptake will be quick!
Out of one 5gal keg, I will typically bottle about (22) 12oz crown capped bottles - these are competition beers. Then (3) 750ml Cork and Caged bottles, then (20-23) 375ml cork and caged belgian bottles with whatever's left.
Mushroom corking is the most fun method in my opinion, I love this way of serving beer.

Mid Sept - late October: "Rest months"
Fruit is all harvested, beers are packaged, I'm exhausted.
Really what's happening is I am harvesting my hops, helping out at the winery my wife works at, making fresh hopped beer.
But this is a good time for the bottles in the previous cycle to condition. By now the first Kriek might be ready to open, the plums and hybird plumcot/pluot/aprium beers too.
If I were a lambic brewer, this is when I'd go on Holiday for sure.

TL;DR - I manage this crazy hobby by compartmentalizing it into 3.5 seasons and don't get distracted trying to do everything all the time. None of this is revolutionary, it's very similar to how lambic and spontaneous ale producers operate, because the seasons dictate it.

What do you think of this regimen? Do you do something similar? How do you keep the sanity, year after year?

 

[monkeymath]

I wanna be you when I grow up.

 

[pursuit0fhoppiness]

Love this type of post. Truly envious. I'm in a condo for now so restrained to 5 fermenters of funky beer for fruiting/blending. I just do it all year round to always have something to brew or bottle, but I can see how your method would be beneficial when you've got a lot of volume to brew/bottle.

You mentioned coolshipping during the winter months. Are those batches all turbid mashed and with aged hops? If so do you find you get a lambic-esque funk from most of these beers?

 

[mashpaddled]

This is generally what I do with my sour beers as I started brewing sour beer in the winter incidentally and have always fallen into the pattern of thinking that way and then I can keep track of age by the passing of the number of winters. With saisons and other beers that endure lengthy aging I am less committed to time.

 

[goodolarchie]

I'm in a condo for now so restrained to 5 fermenters of funky beer for fruiting/blending. I just do it all year round to always have something to brew or bottle, but I can see how your method would be beneficial when you've got a lot of volume to brew/bottle.

Hey that's how I started too! I stacked corny kegs full of aged beer in this little closet in my "garage" at the ground floor where it waivered between 50-55F and made some pretty nice beer. I remember the first Kriek I made was actually really good and I thought Hey you really don't have to pay $20 for 750ml of this sh*t!

You mentioned coolshipping during the winter months. Are those batches all turbid mashed and with aged hops? If so do you find you get a lambic-esque funk from most of these beers?

I only do one or two coolshipped batches. I have built just a little 15 gallon stainless trough that can be piped up then dumped back down. To be honest these rarely turn out great - they tend to lack the depth I get from dregs or commercial blends. I want this to work because I could save a LOT of time and money managing yeast and bacterial cultures! But they are fun and interesting to blend with. A stiff breeze could convince me to dump mediocre beer. I am hoping that when my fruit trees grow, they'll share more lovely microflora and I'll do some early spring batches.

Turbid mash? Yep - nothing Cantillon crazy but I aim to preserve a good bit of starchy wort for extended aging. I am very much a fan of aged Saaz Hallertauer M. and Cascade hops specifically, but I have also used aged whole leaf Amarillo, EKG, Willamette, Mt Hood and a couple others. I play around with late additions too... Styrian Savijnski, Cascade, EKG and Saaz quite a bit. Hops are without a doubt the gateway to deep funky aromas, aged hops in long-aged beers are a big separator between American Wild Ale and real lambic to me, moreso than the turbid mash. American breweries seem to be keen on traditional American hopping though.

 

[pursuit0fhoppiness]

That's awesome. Sour, funky homebrew that tastes like lambic is my goal. Recently implemented turbid mashing as well as aged leaf hops, so really hope I'm close in about a year! Also planning to dry hop one with aged leaf hops soon to see what that adds.

A homebrewer in my club has a full size barrel that he started a solera in years ago, removes 1/3 to fruit/bottle straight and fills it back up each year, and it tastes like legit geuze and fruit lambic, it's incredible. Motivation.

 

[goodolarchie]

A homebrewer in my club has a full size barrel that he started a solera in years ago, removes 1/3 to fruit/bottle straight and fills it back up each year, and it tastes like legit geuze and fruit lambic, it's incredible. Motivation.

I know a lot of clubs that do that, I think it's really cool, but I was never fortunate to be a part of one that had enough interested folks, so I bear this cross alone. Having one barrel to covet and baby that kicks out amazing beer is like lightning striking. I still have my first little barrel, it's a 50L Hungarian Oak that's 8 years old, and I absolutely covet the beer that comes out of it. I just took my solera draw for the year... it would be easy to bottle that unblended, call it my best beer of 2021.

 

[Fly_Guy]

This might be just the thread I was looking for.

Brewed up a light ale in February of 21. Primary fermentation was with us05 then pitched a lacto blend, a brett blend and a pediococcus strain.

My plan is to bottle 2/3rds of it and transfer the other 3rd to save and make a gueuze with.

After a year and a few months of sitting in a fermentor, do I need to buy more us05 to bottle condition with? Or will there be enough of a sour blend/viable us05 to condition the beers?

This is my first true sour which is why I am seeking the advice of the experts!

 

[mashpaddled]

This might be just the thread I was looking for.

Brewed up a light ale in February of 21. Primary fermentation was with us05 then pitched a lacto blend, a brett blend and a pediococcus strain.

My plan is to bottle 2/3rds of it and transfer the other 3rd to save and make a gueuze with.

After a year and a few months of sitting in a fermentor, do I need to buy more us05 to bottle condition with? Or will there be enough of a sour blend/viable us05 to condition the beers?

This is my first true sour which is why I am seeking the advice of the experts!

Gueuze is probably not the right term here but to answer your question: It's kinda up to you. There will be viable yeast to carbonate the beer but how quickly that happens is more of a question mark. Usually adding a little extra yeast at bottling can help ensure quick carbonation. Many of us use wine yeast like EC-1118 or KV-1116 because they are less temperamental about acidic environments. I've bottled sour beer with US05 and other beer yeast before without problems though.

 

[Fly_Guy]

I thought a gueuze was a blend of a 1 year old, 2 year old and 3 year old sour beer. Maybe it's more complex than that. Thats my plan for the gallon or so I will not be bottling.

Thank you for the yeast information. I know the fiance will be itching to try the sours once cold and carbonated, so I will likely use one of those to help speed things up a bit.

 

[goodolarchie]

I thought a gueuze was a blend of a 1 year old, 2 year old and 3 year old sour beer. Maybe it's more complex than that.

Short answer is it's not just sour beer, it's lambic. Technically you can't make lambic outside of where HORAL says you can, but you can certainly reproduce the process with starchy wort, aged hops, cheap/free barrels and patience. Mostly you can make something awesome which is why I posted this above. Spontaneous takes dedication though and can produce some meager results so there's no shame in going dregs and commercial brett/LAB.

My joke is a pitch of my favorite Brett in the world costs $6 and comes with a free world class beer. You'll find it in a grocery store labeled "Orval."

 

[Fly_Guy]

Wow, I was completely off. I am a little embarrassed by how far off I was.
Thank you for being kind in your education and not...well ya know. Haha.
I guess I will just have to tell everyone it is merely a blended aged sour.

Do you try to build a starter with sour dregs or just dump them in?

 

[mashpaddled]

Short answer is it's not just sour beer, it's lambic. Technically you can't make lambic outside of where HORAL says you can, but you can certainly reproduce the process with starchy wort, aged hops, cheap/free barrels and patience. Mostly you can make something awesome which is why I posted this above. Spontaneous takes dedication though and can produce some meager results so there's no shame in going dregs and commercial brett/LAB.

My joke is a pitch of my favorite Brett in the world costs $6 and comes with a free world class beer. You'll find it in a grocery store labeled "Orval."

HORAL isn't the absolute word on lambic--Cantillon, Drie Fonteinen and Girardin aren't members--but generally we've all decided to accept that lambic can only be made in the Pajottenland region of Belgium.

Wow, I was completely off. I am a little embarrassed by how far off I was.
Thank you for being kind in your education and not...well ya know. Haha.
I guess I will just have to tell everyone it is merely a blended aged sour.

Do you try to build a starter with sour dregs or just dump them in?

Part of learning is learning you were wrong.

I don't make starters with dregs. I just pitch them. You can pitch them with a sour blend but you'll probably want to at least add enough fresh sacc to get good primary fermentation. If you plan to pitch just dregs you'll need a fair amount to make sure fermentation starts relatively quickly.