Where the Wild Things Are: The Carol

About a year ago, actually, 52 weeks ago, I brewed up a Lambic that I fermented with the yeast I cultured off of blackberries from my backyard and a small starter of yeast from organic peaches grown locally.  After making the wort and adding the entire starter from each yeast to the carboy, I had a "funny" fermentation which consisted of small bubbles flowing up to the top quickly to feed a very small fluffy white head that looked like a single centimeter of soda foam.  Eventually the fermentation looked a little more like normal, but the krausen never really roared up like a normal yeast would.  There were chunks of peach flesh and blackberry, as well as oak chunks on top.  I also added some wild grapes after a month for a little extra yeast.  After only three weeks it was down from 1.053 to 1.006.  Nice and fruity, with a light tartness, mostly tropical and berries.

Over the course of fermentation, I have added dregs from commercial and homebrewed sours to try to get more complexity built up from other sources of Brett and bacteria.  I added some Russian River dregs, Cantillon Grand Cru, Jolly Pumpkin, Oude Beersel, Girardin Black, some infected Logen Berry mead a buddy made, and some dregs from a sour I did with Russian River dregs.  This will ensure a more complex beer, but it also kills much of the work I did culturing the yeast since the final product isn't a showcase of what that yeast can actually do (part of the reason I am going to brew a new one this year with fruit cultured yeast again and leave it alone).

After a few months I noticed a lot of oak character showing, and seeing that I used 5 oz of French Oak that had come from a wine barrel in Lodi, it wasn't any wonder why.  I needed to do something to stop the oaking, but I didn't want to lose all of the goodness in the trub and yeast that is needed for a Lambic to ferment properly.  I racked the beer out of the carboy into my sour bottling bucket and then dumped the trub, yeast, fruit, oak, etc., into a vessel while I cleaned the carboy and removed all the oak.  After this I added a few pieces of oak to the carboy, opened the valve on the bucket and refilled the carboy.  While this was going on I also racked the yeast, trub, and fruit back into the carboy as well.

I noticed an oxidative character beginning to creep in around January, so I brewed a little extra wort on my Saison and added a half gallon to the carboy to displace the head space.  The FG was still at 1.005.  Only took a few days for the fermentation to kick back up and take on the fresh wort.  After about a month or so, it was back down to 1.005.

Given another month, the FG had gotten down to 1.002, and there was a sheen atop the wort slightly resembling an oil slick, not like the pellicles I have seen before on my other sour beers.  By mid summer the taste was nice, funky, tart, clean, fruity, spicy, but lots of oak, so I racked it from the 6 gallon carboy into a 5 gallon, taking some of the yeast sediment at the bottom with it.  Given another month, the oakiness is starting to fade some.  I racked 1/2 gallon out of the carboy and added 1/2 gallon of my sour Blonde ale to try to cut down on the oak a little.  A few weeks later I am happy with the results, and am ready to bottle, and seeing that it is sitting at 1.001, not much more for it to do in the short term.

A beer that I have been watching, shaping, tasting, aging, and waiting on for a year is no simple brown bottle beer.  For this batch I needed to do something special, at least for a few bottles.  I started with 375ml Champagne bottles.  At this point I could go with cork and cage, or cork and cap (Cantillon style), but I opted for a cap and wax seeing as they look very nice, and it's super cheap as well as not requiring extra equipment.  Add to this full labels with art work and it is a very nice show piece, even if it is only 6 bottles worth.

I hope that the beer will carbonate quicker than my other sour which has been bottled for nearly 7 months and is still fairly flat.  Our club has a competition coming up and in late October that I would like to enter this batch into.  I will of course set the bulk of this beer aside to cellar for years to come and continue to develop.

This beer will be the first installment in my new series of beers, dubbed Where the Wild Things Are, named after characters from the children's book made movie.  The first is going to be called The Carol.  One of the main Wilds, he was impulsive, much like brewing a beer with blackberry yeast, adding dregs at random, and over oaking, only to move the beer twice.

NOTE: This beer took 1st place in Sour Beers and BEST OF SHOW in February 2014 at the KLCC BJCP comp.

Update: Laminated Envelope - Blackberry Version

Awhile back I brewed up an American Blonde Ale to test my fermenters that had housed infected batches.  The resulting beers were mixed and soured with different dregs and such.  After some time had passed I split the batches into 2 5 gallon carboys and added mangoes and mango juice to one, leaving the other one plain for a later addition of fruit.  Just a few weeks ago we returned from a long trip to California to find an abundance of blackberries on the large bush that has overtaken an entire fence in our back yard.  We were able to pick nearly 6# in one evening, and still had tons left that we were unable to get to that day.  Seeing that we didn't need that many berries, I decided to split off 4.33# of blackberries into the plain sour batch.  After dropping some in, one-by-one, I tried pulverizing them in my hand, and this too caused too much splashing, so I blended them up in the blender and poured it through my funnel with a tube on the end that was under the surface, cutting down on aeration.  The beer is a deep purple with chunks of blackberry floating around and a very broken pellicle on top.  Honestly, it looks like a giant version of the starter I did about this time last year from the same blackberry bush to make the Lambic I am going to bottle soon.  Between the two carboys I should have about 4+ gallons of Sour Blackberry Blonde and nearly 5 gallons of Sour Mango Blonde come next summer.

Review: AmillenniALE Gone Wild

Batch #3... So many firsts. My first recipe. My first partial mash. My first starter. My first Belgian. My first Wild hair... at bottling, after adding the priming sugar, I thought, this would be awesome with Brett. I diverted a gallon to a glass jug I had and hit it with the dregs of Reinaert Flemish Wild Ale and Matilda along with some DME. The beer had finsihed at 1.021. I also added some American Oak, medium toast. After about 7 months, I didn't notice much Brett funk, and a lot of oak, so I moved it to a new jug, hit it with a starter of the dregs of Russian River Consecration and went sour and wild with it. After another 5 months, it was nice and sour, oaky, finished at 1.002 and was highly oxidized, but I bottled it anyways, and boy am I glad I did. Sucks that I only got a 12 pack of it though.

Look: This beer pours a super clear amber with a very thin beige bubbly head that fades quick and leaves thin lacing and legs.

Aroma: Smells of cherry pie and barnyard funk, lots of Brett in the nose, with red wine, oak, light vinegar twang, wet cardboard from the oxidation, black pepper and clove spiciness.

Taste: Sour hits the palate first, lactic, and a sharp acetic vinegar, followed by oak and an alcohol that is smooth yet vacates your sinus cavity on the exhale. Spiciness comes next, with fruits, cherries, and Brett funk, oxidized, and a spicy finish.

Mouthfeel: The beer is light and thin, carbonation is lacking, bone dry finish and very tart, but not puckering, astringent and tannic from the oak in a nice way, as it warms it leaves an astringent bitterness in the finish.

Overall: Very nice sour. Very glad at how this extract/first partial mash, first recipe, shoot-from-the-hip, last minute, single gallon, evolving-experiment turned out. The sourness is clean and sharp, a nice blend of lactic and acetic acids, not too overdone, but nicely sour. The dry finish, tannins, and sourness with the low IBUs works well here, and creates a great finish. The Brett is very complex and enjoyable, and the spicy alcohol is subtle for being about 9% with no residual sugar to balance it. Definitely needs more carbonation to help with the thin body and to help all the flavors and aromas pop as well as to help cleanse the palate after each sip. Oxidation is to be expected and considering the high amount of it at bottling, I'm surprised (and excited) at how restrained it is now.

Wet Cardboard Stinks!

After all the effort to brew a clean beer after all the infections, after brewing up a new recipe, after finding that the conical was still infected, after deciding to sour the whole batch and fermenter for good, after working up a great plan, wet cardboard! The conical is opaque so I can't see what is going on inside. Last night I popped the top to see if any progress had been made in 5 days (no, it hadn't), to find an odd smell. I flipped a couple of the oak cubes over since they had some yeast slurry on top of them, and when I pulled my hand back it hit me... oxidized! The conical also holds about 8.5 gallons, so 3 gallons of beer and 5.5 gallons of head space in a plastic conical is not a good thing. I pulled a sample and the taste is the same, wet cardboard. I grabbed as many 2L soda bottles (PET just like Better Bottles) as I could and Oxicleaned them quick, then ran off the beer into them and sealed them up in an attempt to save it from a total bust, we'll see if that worked in about 5 months when I reopen them for gravity and sampling. If not, then I can use them to inoculate other sours. If so, we proceed as planned. I am hoping for the latter.

BTW, the smell of oxidized beer does not wash off easily, nor does it make for a good night's rest when you put your hand near your face.