Mixed Culture Wet Hop Saison - Hop Harvest Collaboration with the Brewery at Bacchus

The northeastern US, plucky go-getter that it is, will have a whole lot of hops in the coming years. In five years, ten years, the entire country's hop industry could start to look very very different as new growers, new flavors, and even more new varieties start hitting the market at scale. This is old news, of course, but it still feels like we're waiting to observe the real impact of the restored northeastern hop growing region, and we'll be waiting a little while longer.

There are two big primary questions yet to be answered, from my perspective:

1. How will these new hops taste? Plenty of beers have been brewed with northeast hops now, but even the most established hop farms in the region are still quite young, and thus, I'm guessing the character of the hops will only really begin to take up an identity in the next few years. We'll hopefully start to see new varieties (or renamed varieties) with flavors distinct to this region.

2. How will breweries be able to use the hops? This seems like a fairly mundane logistical question, but it's going to be pretty significant in what kinds of beers these hops are used to make. Pellet hops are much, much easier for most breweries to use — conversely, leaf hops can be almost impossible for some breweries to use at different stages of the process. But pelletizers are expensive, and at the moment, inaccessible to most hop growers in the region.

What we're left with is a lot of mildish leaf hops. And a lot of leaf hops means a very large mound of hops indeed — hell, another reason it's not practical for us to use leaf hops at Kent Falls is that we'd simply have no space to store what we'd need. While the go-to strategy to dispose of any large pile of hops would typically be to throw them in an IPA, you'd have to be very deliberate when taking this approach. Wet hop IPAs have become a huge thing every harvest season of the last few years. But even an IPA blasted with a comically-large pile of hops may turn out with a surprisingly mild flavor. The returns, in other words, maybe be somewhat disappointing in proportion to what went into the beer. There's also the fact that wet hops simply taste very different from traditionally-used dry hops, and this needs to be taken into consideration when adding a wet hop IPA to a brewery's profile. If all of Kent Falls' other IPAs are juice-forward, an earthy, mild, grittier harvest IPA may stand out as a bit odd next to the rest of the lineup.

Barry and I were talking to Mike from the Brewery at Bacchus (editor's note: Mike and Jay, who have been brewing the beer for Bacchus for a couple years now, will soon be taking the lead at Hudson Valley Brewery, in Beacon, NY, so watch out for their stuff to hit the market in a big way soon) about doing a collaboration, and it quickly arose that we should do something based around our hop harvest in early September. From there, we decided that a wet-hopped farmhouse ale was the way to go. Both Bacchus and Kent Falls brew a lot of saison-ish beers, and we decided that the communal nature of the hop harvest was a very fitting start for a collaboration. For fermentation, we literally mixed together our cultures — saison yeast, lactobacillus and Brettanomyces from both Kent Falls and Bacchus went into the batch. There's quite a variety in this batch, though the cultures here are very aggressive. Fermentation was quick. While Tiny House has had several months to age and condition since we brewed it, the turnaround on a beer like this can be much faster than conventional wisdom used to have it. Such sourish mixed culture saisons rarely need more than three months before they can be packaged, in my experience — but obviously, different procedures, cultures, gravities and other extenuating conditions have to be taken into account.

The brewday itself for this beer was quite fun — as some of you may know, as there were a hundred plus people in attendance, and maybe you were there yourself . We're going to be hosting a hop harvest festival every year, and to make it Fun For The Whole Family, we make a big to do out of it. Pig roast, live music, beer, etc, and the general good vibes of a community gathering. Lots of fun, etc. All day long, the hops being harvested were thrown directly into the beer. I mentioned that leaf hops / whole cone hops are quite difficult to use in our setup, and the only place we can practically toss in such large quantities of vegetable matter without an epic bagging nightmare are the lauter tun. Fortunately, this is quite easy — I cleaned the spent grain out of the lauter tun real good, and transferred the wort out of the kettle and into this vessel instead. The false bottom allowed us to dump close to a hundred pounds of wet hops in without fear of clogging anything. At the end of the day, I simply knocked out as I normally would, and cleaned up the used hops as if they were a soggy mass of spent grain.

The resulting beer is simple but delicious — a well-balanced sour farmhouse ale with a good blend of acidity, Brett funk, and tannic rustic earth-notes from the hops. It's extremely complex for its low weight of only 4% ABV. I'll be looking forward to brewing something like this each year. If you would like to try this beer and are / know someone who is in the western Connecticut area, we will be releasing this at the New Milford farmer's market (indoors, basement of the school) this Saturday, January 16th. Keep in mind that while you may think I am a hack and my beer is all dumb, this *was* a collaboration with the Brewery at Bacchus, and those guys are pretty legit, and have never really bottled much before. So! Also, thanks to Mike's fiance Natalie for the lovely beer label. She knows how to art it up real good.

Barrel-Aging Techniques and Process: Second Nature Peach Sour Saison

There are a number of reasons that writing about beer for this blog has become more challenging since jumping into the commercial side of things for Kent Falls Brewing Co. Surprisingly, it's not even so much that the actual brewing process has changed. I found it relatively easy to scale everything up — that transition is something I want to write about more, and will, but I almost don't know what to say. Most brewing to me is a matter of intuition, and while there are plenty of technical and logistical things to work out, my answer to how I scale up my old concepts most of the time would be a big ol'  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

More challenging, in terms of writing about brewing, is that you start to think about each beer and the process behind it differently. Or at least, that's been the case with me, but the last year and a half of my life have been one never-ending mental breakdown, so who knows. Regardless, as a homebrewer, each batch felt more distinct, more of an individual project. One batch at a time, everything I made was a focused reservoir of my attention. It seems like it should be the opposite, but as a homebrewer, I felt way more obsessive about each beer I made, and for better or worse, far more inclined to poke and prod at it as I waited anxiously to know how it would come out.

I'm sure plenty of commercial brewers feel this way about every one of their commercial brews too, so maybe it's just the delirium and crushing existential crises warping my attentions, but brewing now feels more like a ride that I'm trying to steer than some little pet project that I'm micro-managing obsessively. Actually, though, I think homebrewing for long enough inevitably trains you for this too, especially homebrewing sours. You have to learn patience at some point. You have to accept that some batches, of the many carboys that once took up space in my incredibly nerdy and fascinating-to-visitors Beer Room, just have to be ignored for a good long while, and any attention you give them will probably do more harm than good. Scaling up to the point of having a thousand gallons plus of beer in barrels, this effect is exacerbated even more. No longer is this beer a singular, isolated project, but now a chain of events, a chain of 8 - 12 hour work-days, a series of vessels to transfer liquid between. Your attention becomes divided between numerous projects and a hundred points of stress and worry. For the same reason, some of these beers would be impossible to "clone," because there are so many unique steps and variables involved. You could mimic the process, but never the exact circumstances.

But here's the story of one such beer, the first real aged sour beer we've released at Kent Falls. I've done a couple different gose, our seasonal tart saison, and one previous barrel-aged release, a Brett saison with grapefruit zest. But we're finally just starting to dip into the whole barrel-aged sour thing, now that most of our barrels have contained liquid for at least half a year. To start, the barrel-aged saisons are going to fall into two releases. "Nature" will be a mixed-culture barrel-aged saison, always created from some new blend of barrels, and likely a bit different with each release. We'll release that possibly twice a year, or maybe just once a year, to really go for an annual vintage thing. Any fruited barrel-aged saisons will fall under the "Second Nature" name — again, pulling from the same selection of barrels, I'll pull some aging saison to receive fruit.

Even when homebrewing, replicating any one barrel-aged beer is going to be incredibly difficult without blending. Add to that the fact that I'm not necessarily going to try to recreate the exact same beer every time, and I have two dozen barrels to choose from (a very tiny number compared to many breweries) and you're starting from a baseline of endless variation: living beer in a living environment that's going to change and evolve over time. Like most of the barrels in the brewery right now, the two barrels that I selected for this peach sour were filled with liquid from our earliest batches of saison. Probably the most interestingly-different thing about my process for these beers is that the base beer was fermented out to a very low gravity before being transferred into the barrels, like 1.5 plato. Conventional wisdom is generally that you'll want to leave some residual sugar in the beer for the Brett and bacteria to munch on. Brett, however, really doesn't need much to eat to create its distinct character, and even just the autolysis of the yeast around it may be enough to feed it, especially in the oxygen-friendly environment of a barrel.

As a result, the beer resting in the barrel after four months of aging was not crazy sour. It had the pleasant flavor qualities of an aged sour, just minus the bracing acidity. This is pretty much what I was going for — "balance and approachable" seems to be an unstated theme of Kent Falls' beers, so I'm not trying to push my barrel-aged sours to be tongue-savaging acid monsters. I figured the beer would pick up a bit more acidity once it was on the peaches, though, and it did. We have two plastic holding tanks that serve as our fruiting tanks, for now. Some fruit I'm adding straight into the barrel: we picked some 80 lbs of local cherries for another such barrel-aged saison that's been aging since late summer. The cherries can stay in that barrel for as long as they want, as far as I'm concerned. Peaches, though, seemed like a royal pain in the ass to stuff into a barrel, so a plastic secondary tank was the solution we came up with for now.

This lead to one of the most fun (read: not fun) days of my brewing career. A few days before our hop harvest festival, during one of the busiest weeks of the year, and after spending a full day already brewing, I sat around hand-dicing 200 lbs. of peaches and throwing them into the plastic holding tank. I actually just slit the peaches in quarters but left them on the pit, so they held together as whole fruit, but with their flesh exposed. I figured as whole fruit, they'd be less likely to clog something up (a whole peach is larger than the opening of a butterfly valve), but slit, so the inside surface area would still be available to the beer. Anyway, that took until 3 in the morning, even once there were two of us going at it. Really fun, let me tell you.

The beer fermented out on the peaches surprisingly fast, hitting 1 plato terminal gravity in less than two weeks. We only left it there for about 5 weeks before bottling it.

And yet more variables that would be hard to replicate at home: I did absolutely nothing to sanitize the peaches, figuring it'd be nice to pick up whatever local microbes happened to be along for the ride. As a result, the beer went through a really happy pediococcus phase during bottle conditioning, which added complexity and enhanced acidity, rounding out all the flavors to great benefit. Now that it's ready for drinking (the pedio phase cleared up after about 6 weeks, thanks to the Brett hanging around), Second Nature - Peach has one of the best noses on a peach beer that I've had recently, with a perfect marriage of oaky vanilla character (much more than I expected to get out of these wine barrels, to be honest) and juicy fresh peach.

I'm very, very happy with how this one came out, and very excited to share this with everyone once we release it (at the New Milford farmer's market, December 19th, if you happen to be in the area). However, I have no clue how I'd share a recipe for this beer that wasn't utterly meaningless. Hopefully discussing the process (which really is the recipe, in this case) is somewhat helpful, at least. Beers like this, the product of scale-brewing and production schedules and McGuyvering and improvising and last-minute decisions and luck and timing and patience and terroir, are less like painting a portrait, one careful and deliberate brush stroke at a time, and more like some Jackson Pollock expressionist bullshit, dangling from a wire above a canvass, with a bucket of paint, just flinging shit in all directions and trusting that it's going to look pretty cool in the end.

Why Is Gose Suddenly the Hottest Style in Craft Beer?

Watching trends can be disorientingly weird when you're deep on the inside of them. Craft beer is now so many levels down the "hyper-niche" rabbit hole that we can have little explosions of importance within the community that are, I would guess, pretty much invisible to the outside world.

Any niche hobby or interest works this way, of course. What can seem entirely played-out to us, the weirdo beer nerd (or weirdo nerd of whatever interest), is still barely scratching the surface of general public awareness. Remember when, once upon a time, there was pretty much one main huge trend in craft beer: IPA? And IPA created enough buzz in the world at large that soon even outsiders had at least heard of the stuff, even if they hated them. Maybe they couldn't tell you what an IPA was, specifically, or what made it so, but lots of people, all over, had heard the term a bunch. But now we're pretty far into this whole craft beer thing, and within a niche, trends become fractal, smaller, more honed in on their audience, and practically invisible to the world at large. Does a random bar-goer with only a passing interest in beer know what an IPA is? They can probably lay down a reasonably-accurate definition. Could they tell you about gose? I'm guessing not. And yet gose has seen such a surge in this world, it's easy to look at yet another brewery producing yet another gose and think: "Great, just ride that bandwagon like you're in Fast & the Furious." Hell, the New York Times just did a piece on gose. It's out there, even if it's only out there as "this is a niche thing for beer nerds."

Modern beer strikes me as a lot like music, in some of the ways it flows culturally. (I maintain that arguing about who's really 'craft'' is the new arguing about who's really 'punk'). Something almost has to get played out to the point of craziness within its original circles before the outside world even hears about it. As someone who listens to indie-folk, you have to be really, really sick of Of Monsters & Men before your mom calls you up and asks if you've heard about this new band and their novel "hey! ho!" vocals.

So now we're in this peculiar situation where lots of breweries are turning out gose, to the point where it may seem to us that every brewery is suddenly making one, but most people will have no idea what this hot new style of gose is (or how to even pronounce gose). Overnight, we're going from hardly any options (when I first heard about the style four years ago, I could only manage to track down one example at all) to, now, I don't know, a reasonable number of options. I'm not alone in noticing this, of course: I've seen Ed Coffey call summer 2015 the "Summer of Gose", and Bart Watson over at the Brewer's Association called out the style's explosive surge in a recent article analyzing "The Next IPA," which we seem to be searching eternally for.

This is where the education side of the industry comes in. Sometimes, we're going to blow things up real fast and have to help the general public catch up to what we're doing. Gose seems to have happened quicker than most. Still, despite a few vocal online haters of gose, I don't think it's any great mystery as to why the style has seen such an upswing.

What is gose? It's a tart wheat beer from German similar to Berliner Weisse, which experienced the same popularity upswing here a few years earlier. Why did Berliner Weisse get suddenly popular? Because sour is so hot right now, there's a huge demand for such beers, but unlike other sour styles, Berliner Weisse can be made quickly, in a standard production timeline. It gives the consumer what they want within the boundaries of what most normal breweries can fulfill. Gose does all those same things, but gose has one major difference from Berliner Weisse, being brewed with salt. That may seem a very slight difference if everything else were the same, but it turns out to be a pretty big difference in flavor. (Some also include coriander in their gose, but I personally don't consider this addition to be integral to the style, and usually leave it out. I'll have to defer to a beer historian like Ron Pattinson to settle how historically ubiquitous this tactic was).

And I wonder if gose isn't just somewhat attention-grabbing in its uniqueness, helping to bounce it up the Styles of Interest list faster than usual. What other beers are brewed with salt, anyway? Historically, this was done simply because the water of Goslar, Germany, where the style originated, was especially saline. Lots of historic styles derive their personality from the water they were brewed with — how that town's water supply inspired or mandated a certain direction of the beer — but gose is more overt than most. A softness of the water in Pilsen doesn't really scream for attention, and drinkers might enjoy the balance and roast of a Guinness without having any clue as to how and why water chemistry made those beers work. But add enough salt to a beer's brewing liquid, and you'll taste it, and know what you're tasting. Gose makes a great case for how one simple addition can really set the shape of a beer into something new and different.

Some may recoil at the thought of putting salt in something that's already sour and kind of funky — people that don't like gose complain that it's like drinking sweat, but I would argue that if you've ever drank sweat, you have bad taste and do not deserve gose. Adding salt to beer makes sense, if you think about it; salt is a flavor enhancer. Much of water treatment, to me, is about bringing forth the brightest and most expressive flavors in a beer, allowing you to take a very simple recipe and light-footed beer, and accentuate its most interesting, nuanced qualities. Gose goes a little further, dialing up the salt to a level where you're actually aware of its presence. That's fairly unique, but still: salt is a flavor enhancer. (It's also a preservative, which, interestingly to me, makes gose perhaps the closest beer style to lacto-vegetable ferments). So not only does it highlight all the nuanced flavors of a simple sour beer, but it adds its own unique dimension, a new quality of flavor. It's refreshing. It makes you salivate. It makes a less complicated beer a bit more complex.

And it makes for a great foundation for many other flavors, as salt and acidity naturally do. Fruit is even better in a gose than in a Berliner Weisse, though both of course work well to draw out the succulent refreshing qualities of the juice. Or throw some zest in there. Or how about dry-hops? Aromatic hops are great over a sour, but why spend all that time aging some mixed-culture sour in a barrel, only to spike it with an ingredient that's best consumed fresh? Dry-hops add a great deal of complexity to a simpler sour character, and from a brewer's perspective, can be turned around almost as if it were any other hoppy beer. Hence why Alternate World, Kent Fall's dry-hopped gose, is able to be one of our core beers.

Gose gets you sour. It's culinary, it's got unique dimensions, it's versatile, it's pairable. I would guess that IPAs are so popular because so many harmonious, distinct flavors can be extracted from hops without drastically changing the foundation of the beer. IPAs can be highly refreshing (depending on the take) and juicy while offering significant variety. Gose offers that same foundation: an accessible, affordable foundation for the sour beer craze. As experimenters, we love sturdy foundations with which to start. We love beers that refresh in their simplicity. That is why we love gose.

Buckwheat Sour Saison - Recipe, Brewing with Unmalted Adjuncts, & Cereal Mashing Techniques

Let's explore our memory banks for a moment. Even as hombrewers, making beer can get pretty stressful when lots of things start to go wrong. What's the worst brew-day you've ever had?

If I thought about it really hard, I could probably come up with a couple epically annoying brew days in my short career as a brewer. But the one that stands out foremost is the day I brewed this buckwheat sour saison and tried to package an imperial stout at the same time. I can remember it distinctly, because: that day sucked. Hey! Why don't I tell you about it?

I've been fascinated by buckwheat for a while, especially after trying eye-opening beers like Hill Farmstead Le Sarrasin, and reading some intriguing things about the chemical precursors it may set up for microbes to transform. I love stuff like this, the sympathetic magic of fermentation, able to take one simple input and really surprise you with its output. No one seems to completely understand how all of this alchemy works just yet, which makes it even more intriguing to those of us, like me, obsessed with obscurities and unknown horizons.

It's also really nice when things turn out in spite of bothersome complications. But that's like, half of all homebrewing.

For this brew, a 5 gallon batch that I made last fall, I picked up 3 lbs of buckwheat groats from a local health food store. It was probably not wise to brew this on Halloween, inviting some kind of curse down upon me, but whatever, I went for it. With so much unmalted buckwheat in the grain bill, I knew that I wanted to try a cereal mash. At 21%, it seemed like too much to use without trying to extract the sugars. Plus, I was simply curious to try out a cereal mash; I'd never used the technique before, but I knew the modifications we were getting on our brewing system at Kent Falls would make such elaborate mashing procedures at least somewhat easier for future brews. (We have rakes in our kettle that allow us to mash into the kettle, step mash or cereal mash, and transfer into the lauter tun).

Most homebrewers have little reason to ever cereal mash. The large majority of ingredients we use simply don't require it. When unmalted, many raw grains will not release their starches in our typical single infusion-style mashes. But on either the homebrew or the commercial scale, a cereal mash is a ton of effort, and most grains can be obtained in a malted form, or thrown into the recipe in smaller percentages without using a cereal mash simply to steal their flavor qualities, without much concern for their fermentables. If you do want to obtain those fermentables, you need to process the grain in a way that will unlock them. Within a certain temperature range, a cereal mash will gelatanize the starches in the kernel / seed / whatever, by destroying the structure, and thus allowing mash enzymes to later access these starches. It's sort of the "nuke the site from orbit... it's the only way to be sure" of mashing techniques. The exact range of gelatinization varies from plant to plant, but a spread between 120 F to 140 F (50-60 C) will hit it for most grains used in home brewing. Like so:

Unmalted Barley: 140-150 F (60-65C)

Wheat: 136-147 F (58-64 C)

Rye: 135-158 F (57-70 C)

Oats: 127-138 F (53-59 C)

Corn (Maize): 143-165 F (62-74 C)

Rice: 154-172 F (68-78 C)

I haven't been able to find this info for buckwheat, just this generalized summary from a research paper: "The gelatinization temperature of buckwheat flour is higher than that of wheat flour, its gelatinization resistance is greater, the water absorption of its starch granules is stronger, the viscosity is higher and increases quickly during cooling." Looking back at the bullet-chart above, one can surmise (okay, guess) that the gelitinization range of buckwheat is probably similar to that of rice.

For most of those grains listed above, much easier for the homebrewer is simply buying flaked or torrified versions. Commonly available through homebrew supply shops, these two options also gelatinize the grain by breaking down its cellular structure through heat and pressure. Buying grains processed like this is a whole lot easier than cereal mashing, and if you have that option, there aren't too many situations in which there's reason not to take it.

Buckwheat, being fairly obscure, is not easy to obtain malted, especially not at the homebrew scale. Unsurprisingly, flaked buckwheat and torrified buckwheat are not common features on homebrew shop shelves either, or even easy to obtain for commercial breweries (though there is one source). Speaking of obscure, here are some fun facts about buckwheat: it's not a grass or related to grain at all, and is actually related to rhubarb, except the seeds are the part consumed (rhubarb is a vegetable where the stalks are eaten — not a fruit, as you might think by its frequent placement in pies).

Procedurally, a cereal mash goes like this:

1). Mill the cereal adjuncts down to a fine grist, and supplement with about 15% of the overall total malted barley base malt. The malted barley will help to add the enzymes necessary for conversion, which many cereal adjuncts lack. 2). Add hot water at 3 quarts per pound. You want a thin mash here, because you'll be edging it through a boil later, and don't want an overly-gummy soup that'll scorch (as I would later find out). First, though, you're targeting a simple infusion-style mash, so 3). bring the temperature to within the gelitinization range and hold that for 20 minutes to allow the gelitinization to occur. 4). After the geli stage, you can raise your cereal mash up to a gentle boil. Here's where I ran into trouble: the mash will go from a soup of loose grains to a thick, porridge-like gruel. But my understanding of the procedure on brew-day was different: I had thought I was meant to hold the temperature of the boil for an additional 20 minutes. So upon reaching a gentle simmer, thinking this light boiling was that which would ultimately destroy the starches, complete gelatinization, and achieve great success, 5). I kept stirring feverishly. This was actually unnecessary — 6). upon hitting the boil, apparently I could have added the cereal mash right into my main mash — but I stood there and diligently blended the congealing porridge goo with a wooden mixing spoon for another 20 minutes, 7). like some kind of asshole.

Long story short: my cereal mash got a little bit scorched. Just a little though.

Coming out of a cereal mash — especially one that got cooked for longer than necessary, a mildly-toasted extra-thick porridge — buckwheat muck is super mucky. Added to my standard mash of pilsner malt, it got really extra muckity muck. And I got a stuck sparge. A stuck sparge like I've never seen before. I think this was a stuck sparge so stuck it actually went back in time to find my run-off and kill its parents, thus altering the time-space continuum so that my run-off never existed at all. 

I stirred in some rice hulls. The buckwheat muck went back in time again and killed the parents of rice hulls. Rice hulls no longer exist. When I write the words "rice hulls," you have no idea what those symbols on your screen are even meant to represent, because the concept of rice hulls no longer exists in our world. For a moment, or a minute, I just stood there fuming and perplexed. I momentarily considered just dumping the batch, thinking I would never manage to extract any liquid out of the quagmire.

Long story actually-not-that-short, I had to shovel my entire mash tun over into another vessel, add another like a truckload of rice hulls (what? rice huh?) to the bottom of the tun all over the screen until it had an impenetrable security blanket. I then scooped the mash back on top. From there, things finally actually went smoothly. With this beer. Also on that day, I was trying to keg an imperial stout. Have I mentioned how much I hate leaf hops and their tendency to clog things? Anyway, that's a story for another time.

I fermented this guy in my 6 gallon homebrew barrel that's home to one of my house cultures, which, upon taking residence in the barrel, has definitely grown more and more sour over time. Something else that I mean to write about another time: how mixed cultures can change in their performance after repeated repitchings. This was about the third use of this particular house culture, and the lactobacillus in the barrel clearly were ready to leap out ahead and get to work — over the four months I let this age, it's developed a nice strong acidity, but firmly in the lactic side of things. No acetic, and nothing harsh, fortunately. In fact, the very subtle smoke character imparted by scorching my mash a bit didn't hurt the beer at all, to my great surprise. You can taste it in the background, but it tastes just like a very subtle smokiness, to the point where I enjoy it as an incredible complexity, rather than a flaw. That, in addition to whatever nuances the buckwheat added (it grows harder and harder to determine what came from where), make this taste like a much older sour than it really is; I find it to be excitingly complex for a beer so young. It's far more multi-layered than other young sour saisons I've had.

Coincidentally, yesterday I brewed a buckwheat saison on the commercial scale. It'll be going into a 10 bbl stainless tank and getting a new construction of my mixed house cultures. Needless to say, I didn't try to emulate exactly the same mashing procedure — but writing about this new batch is an entry for another time.



Recipe-
6.0 Gal., All Grain
Brewed: 10.30.14
Bottled On: 1.17.15
Fermented at room temp, 72 F
OG: 1.065
FG: 1.004
ABV: 8%

Malt-
77.5% [#11] Pilsner malt
21.1% [#3] buckwheat
1.4% [3.2 oz] acid malt (pH adjustment)

Hop Schedule-
1 oz Brewer's Gold @flameout

Yeast-
White Labs Saison II
House Sour Saison Culture - White Mana

When Life Gives You Double-Batch Brews, Make Lemony Kettle Soured Saisons

The label art indicates in which season the beer was brewed. Wowsers!

I've recently found myself in a situation that, while certainly not unprecedented, is definitely unusual. I am far from the first homebrewer to jump into commercial brewing with no prior experience working at a brewery. Personally, I think the lines between "commercial" and "homebrewer" are going to become increasingly blurred over time as far as the Assumption of Quality goes. Newish online communities like Milk the Funk are already a mix of both pros and homebrewers, all interested in pushing fermentation boundaries with experiments that are cutting-edge no matter who is making them or at what scale. A brewer is a brewer, in my opinion. The equipment doesn't matter too much once you know how to use it effectively.

But equipment does matter, whether a homebrewer or a pro, in that you have to do the best you can with what you got. Only have three conicals? Gotta figure out how many house cultures you can juggle — you're not gonna be able to keep brewing like a homebrewer with ten carboys in a side room and a shelf stacked with jars of yeast. How long is each beer going to take to finish? What's your brewing schedule? Packaging schedule? You only have one brite tank — what happens if two batches finish at the same time? What happens if you have to harvest yeast from two batches at the same time and you don't have a yeast keg free? And how do you dry-hop without a top-access manway, anyway? Can someone please make me a huge funnel that flares outwards about two feet and tri-clamps onto a 2-inch port?

There are endless challenges involved in getting a brewery operating smoothly, especially with extremely limited manpower (to be clear: my nickname at Kent Falls is "Manpower"), but I think you have to look at every roadblock as a potential jumping off point toward new ideas. "The friction of challenge is often that which creates the very spark to ignite a blaze of ingenuity," is probably close enough to an expression that people might sometimes say, I assume, and also an important lesson in why you should never come up with ideas during dry season in a forest. #firesafety

It just so happens that Kent Falls Brewing Co. is on an operating farm, and we're trying to embrace the legacy of farmhouse brewing in many different ways. It's always shocking to me how so many beer styles are a product of happenstance. Brewers didn't start decoction mashing because they did some test batches and realized it would improve their beer — they did it because of a change in taxes on their mash tun volume. Farmhouse brewing has always been about using what you have in the best way possible, and we're trying to keep that in the back of our minds all the time, with everything we do here. The old milk chiller in the cow barn? It helped sell Barry on the property back in 2011, when it occurred to him that it could be used as a coolship and open fermentation vessel. Use everything you have in the most productive, most inventive, most coolest way possible.

By the time I got involved in the brewery, the equipment was already purchased. I didn't have to think about what brewing system, what size, how many tanks, how many tanks to start with and how many to aim to end up with, single batch, double batch, triple batch, etc. As with everything in brewing, this could be good or bad or a little of both. I didn't have to spend months contemplating and jotting down pros and cons of different configurations. My challenge was to simply figure out the best way to use what we had: three 30-bbl fermentors and a 15-bbl brewhouse (plus 16 oak wine barrels).

And our earliest, primary goal was to develop Field Beer, our saison using 100% local malt. Eventually Field Beer will utilize 100% local ingredients, once there's a large enough supply of local hops. There are a few blog posts I probably could and should write about Field Beer — about why local is important to Kent Falls Brewing, what it means in terms of quality, logistics, and the context of this specific beer — but my mission began with the basis of the beer already established. Field Beer will rotate with the seasons, the recipe changing to incorporate a different unmalted grain (oats, spelt, wheat, rye) and a different hop variety each season. I've been pleased beyond my expectations with the quality and efficiency we've gotten from these relatively new operations; our growers and Valley Malt nailed it. We had the ingredients we needed to make a great local saison. We just needed to figure out how to make a flagship beer like this as interesting as possible. The recipe itself was always going to be fairly simple: that rotating unmalted grain (oats for winter) as a small (<10%) portion of the grainbill, and Connecticut-grown, Valley Malt-malted Pilsner for the rest.

I am fascinated by the opportunities to blend. But until our barrel program is relatively established, blending in the traditional context will be fairly limited. I debated blending in old barrel-beer with fresh batches of Field Beer, but that raised more logistical issues than was worth considering for our first beer. The idea stuck with me though: in some ways, double batch brewing is a form of blending. Maybe you have to brew twice to fill each conical, but rather than looking at this as twice the amount of effort for the same result, what if you looked at it as an opportunity to add differentiation? What if there was something unique and different you could do because of the double-batch brew thing, and not in spite of it? Like sour just half the batch, to add a dash of refreshing tartness to the whole beer?

The great thing about this strategy is that it doesn't actually add a ton of time, effort or risk to the process of making the beer, yet it has a great impact on the flavor and complexity of the saison. So far, we've brewed three batches of Field Beer. We decided not to sour that first batch, for various reasons, and treated it as a unique one-off First Batch Ever (read all about the madness that went into making that first batch) and was thus a straight-up 'classic' neo-saison, 5.2% ABV, lightly hopped with American Brewer's Gold. Batch 2 was soured, as the beer will always be going forward. (Bottles include the batch number, but I think Batch 1 has pretty much sold out now anyway).

I will continue to refine and tweak the process as I brew more batches, I'm sure, but the basic deal is this: we mash as normal, keep the temp in the kettle above the pasteurization range until run-off is complete, then begin running the wort through the heat exchanger and back into the kettle. While we're doing this, I run CO2 through the aeration stone rather than oxygen. This way oxygen is scrubbed out, and forms a blanket over the wort in the kettle. I pitch my house lacto culture, rather than innoculating with grain. I've been using this culture (a blend of at least five different lacto strains) for some time now, and prefer both the diversity in culture and reliability in performance I've found with it. If you want to get your own house lacto culture going, my recommendation would be to simply acquire a bunch of different lacto strains from various sources and throw them together... maybe culture some from grain as well, if you're feeling extra sassy.

As far as the souring process goes, time and temperature are the main knobs that I'm going to fiddle with: the first batch I cooled down to 115 F before pitching the lacto, and I let it go for 36 hours, until it was at 3.4 pH. Without any additional heat, the temp in the kettle only dropped down to 104 F before we cut it and fired up the kettle to pasteurize.

After both 'turns' of the batch were together in the tank and fermented out by our saison culture, the resulting acidity is where I wanted it, clean, crisp, refreshing, adding brightness to the beer more than any big pucker-punch of acid. You definitely get the whiff of funky lactobacillus fermentation in the nose, but it's free of anything off. Flavorwise, this is balanced well between lemony tartness and the rustic weird earthfruit of a saison. I'm quite happy with how refreshing and approachable this beer is, how well the souring worked, and how very clean the result of this process was.

I should say that, of course, this is not meant to be a perfectly accurate representation of how historic saison was made. We're not trying to do that. We're a modern American farmhouse brewery, though I'm certainly inspired by historic saison. And we're trying to emulate the mindset of those old farmhouse breweries, but not necessarily any exact recipe. So, no, historic brewers probably didn't kettle sour their saisons like this. We're not necessarily aiming to brew a tart saison just because a lot of historic saison was tart. We're aiming to brew a saison that we find enjoyable to drink, and aiming to take the farmhouse philosophy of using what you have in the most productive, most inventive, most coolest way possible.

As you may or may not know, we're self-distributing in Connecticut for now. Connecticut does not have many breweries making sour beer, or funky beer, or wild beer. I hope we can turn a lot of new drinkers into fans of the tart stuff. So far, the results are promising. I find it actually helps to not over-explain these things: non-fermentation geeks don't need all the particulars and complications. Sometimes if you explain too much beforehand, they'll be overwhelmed, and thus mentally braced to kick back against this too-much-new thing they're trying. But if you only explain: "It's tart, which makes it even more refreshing," the response is generally extremely positive. People focus on the fact that a tart beer is refreshing, which it is, and not that it's some crazy shocking new experience, which it shouldn't be, if it's well balanced. And I've heard now, multiple times, maybe the perfect response: "Damn, this would go great with a burger." There we go.

We bottled 60 cases of this here batch of Field Beer, which will be released locally on 4/17. In case you're interested in checking this particular beverage out, our map of places distributed to is right here.

Lactobacillus funkfoam, or view from a spaceship?

A photo posted by Derek (@bearflavored) on Feb 25, 2015 at 10:44am PST

Barrel-Aged Sour Saison on Doughnut Peaches - Recipe & Tasting Notes

Brewery: Bear Flavored
Style: Sour Farmhouse Ale / Saison
Brewed: 4.24.14
Bottled On: 9.24.14
ABV: 5.6%

Life in a barrel, round two.

The first thing out of my beautiful new-to-me (used) 6 gallon oak barrel was a weird concoction, partly just to see if anything even weirder than what I was planning would arise. So I aged a 14% ABV Brett cyser in the guy. When that checked out, clearly its next passenger would have to be beer. And since its previous inhabitant had been funky, its next inhabitant would be so too. I'd committed this barrel to funkdom for life.

Many homebrewers don't get the chance to mess around with barrels. Small barrels have this annoying tendency to be both aggressively over-priced, and yet less practical in use than their bigger brothers, due to the drastically increased ratio of surface area. Which means they'll set you back a lot of dough, and yet you can't easily age in them the types of beers a brewer would be most inclined to age in a barrel. Like long-aged sours.

Fortunately, I brew a lot of sour farmhouse ales that only take a couple months to finish up. Just about perfect for small-barrel aging.

Sour saisons have become big lately, and I wonder if it's just because saisons in general really took off, and obviously we're going to try to sour just about anything, or if everyone realized the same thing at the same time: you can ferment out a sour saison in much less time than a lambic-like aged sour, and yet still achieve a beer that's complex and interesting enough to be worth the effort. Saison yeast are so highly attenuating that there's generally not a lot of residual sugar left for the other microbes to work on — meaning, theoretically at least, less time required. And sour saisons generally don't invite the entire complex ecosystem that most aged ferments have, so there's less of the long-term breakdown of complex sugars; more big pushes of initial primary fermentation. Since I incorporate Brettanomyces in mine, you still have at minimum the standard aging process of a Brett beer. But that's a matter of months, not years. Some sour saison blends use only Saccharomyces and lactobacillus, and those could probably finish up in weeks.

I've been tempted to move a long-aging sour into this barrel, believe me. I have a few going that would be solid candidates. The problem then, is, your barrel is now permanently an aged-sour barrel, as far as the cultures inside go. So you've either got to keep moving aged sours in and out of it, keep an aged sour in it for a while (until another is ready to fill it) and risk an ingress of too much oxygen, or else leave the barrel empty of beer for long spells in between brief aged-sour excursions. (Even writing all those logistical concerns out hurts my head). I've given this much thought, trying to decide what cultures I wanted to have a home inside this wood permanently. The sour saison culture (White Mana) living within now is, I'm pretty sure, the best possible tenant.

One of my favorite souring cultures, a barrel that had already proven to be reliable and trustworthy, and a good base saison. What else could a beer need?

Fruit, maybe?

And so I ventured to Fishkill Farms, one of my favorite local growers of Food, where I've also done a few homebrew demos and sauerkraut workshops. They're good people and take their shit seriously, so I knew they'd have something for me. Sure enough, I found not just beautiful peaches, but a type of peach I didn't even realize existed before: doughnut peaches. Look if you're just going to go ahead and combine two of my very favorite things together in one weird looking fruit, I am so on that.

Adding fruit to a beer in a barrel is a royal pain in the ass. The easy way would have been to cut the peaches into cubes and jam them through the bunghole of the barrel. For some reason that is no longer clear to me but was clearly the result of sheer stupidity, I felt strongly at the time that puree'ing the peaches would be the way to go. Cubing and dropping would have been much faster. But I got out my blender and spent a lovely Thursday evening covered in peach detritus as I blended, two liters at a time, and poured the puree into the empty barrel. Once the peaches were all blended up real nice and inside the barrel, I finally transferred the beer on top of them. Piece of cake doughtnut!

Actually, I remember now: I figured turning the peaches into puree would save me the trouble of potentially having peach cubes lodged in my barrel afterwards, impossible to remove. Shit, that was actually smart. I take back portions of the last paragraph. There might just not be a good way to easily add fruit into a barrel. At least this was just one 6 gallon and not dozens of 225 liter barrels. It's the small things in life.

Peach is notoriously subtle in beer, hard to express even in tame sours. An average for fruit in sour beer is probably somewhere around 1 lb per gallon. With peach, some brewers go as crazy as 4 lbs per gallon. I went with half that. The result, and the success, is subjective... as with so much in brewing. At first I felt this still didn't come out with enough peach character. Many I gave it to said that it had the perfect amount of peach character. As it aged, I came to agree: sure, it could be peachier, but the subtle nature of the flavor is perfectly balanced by the gentle acidity and smooth, richer oak character. Oak and peach together seems like a no-brainer to me, with the vanilla and lingering tannic structure from the barrel positioned just enough to compliment the fruit character, you've established one of the quintessential flavor pairings of the culinary world (peach and vanilla). And I think this is part of the reason that the peach itself doesn't have to be overwhelmingly present, but just present enough. What you want here is the third corner of a well-balanced triangle. There's a brisk, clean acidity, and some residual funk from the last occupant of the barrel: I'm actually quite surprised how much of the cyser carried over. It takes this maybe from a three-pointed beer to a four, but as all of the elements exist in harmony, I find it works quite well even with this unexpected additional dimension.

I found the main down-side to this "fruit in a barrel" business the hard way, when it came time to drink this batch. Pureed fruit still leaves lots of little bits and pieces, which mostly settle to the bottom of the beer by the time it's ready to package. But it would be impossible to avoid sucking them up entirely, and suck up many pieces of peach I did. As a result, the "late fills" off my bottling bucket received huge amounts of sediment. And as a result of that crazy amount of sediment, the bottles all gushed (tons of nucleation points for CO2 to start foaming) and poured like sour peach smoothies. The majority of the bottles, which have only a typical amount of sediment, are perfectly carbed. Except for the ones I bottled in these weirdly-shaped Belgian-cap bottles I love, which, apparently, my Belgian crown capper does not love. And as a result of that, some of those bottles pour basically flat. As a result of all of these things, this may be the most inconsistently carbonated batch of beer I've made in years. Sours are always a pain in the ass to carb properly and consistently, but my main takeaway: always use something to filter out fruit chunks. A fine mesh straining bag, or a steel screen like I use in my dry-hop setup, would both make a huge difference in the amount of gunk that ends up at the bottom of your bottles.

Then again, a sour peach saison smoothie isn't the worst thing in the world, either.


Recipe-
5.0 Gal., All Grain
Brewed: 4.24.14
Bottled On: 9.24.14
Fermented at room temp, 72 F
OG: 1.048
FG: 1.005
ABV: 5.6%

Malt-
72.7% [#6] Pilsner malt
12.1% [#1] rye
12.1% [#1] white wheat

3.1% [4 oz] acidulated malt (pH adjustment)

Hop Schedule-
0.5 oz Citra (old leaf hops) @FWH

0.75 oz Citra (old leaf hops) @flameout

Yeast-
White Labs Saison II

House Sour Saison Culture - White Mana

Other-
10 lbs Doughnut Peaches

1 Oak Barrel

Nelson Sauvin Dry-Hopped No-Boil Sour Ale / Sour IPA - Recipe & Tasting Notes

All the pictures I took for this photo session came out with this weird hazy quality. Fortunately, this is very thematically appropriate for this particular brew.

Brewery: Bear Flavored
Style: Sour IPA / Gose
Brewed: 11.10.14
Kegged On: 1.17.15
ABV: 4.9%

Appearance: golden yellow, haze, ample head, good retention
Smell: tropical fruit, bright lactic tang, funky citrus, guava, lychee, passion fruit
Taste: star fruit, lychee, yellow Gatorade, lactic sour, tropical funk, slightly briny finish
Mouthfeel: med-high carb, light body, crisp, puckering lingering sour in finish

It grows ever harder to label a beer like this without sounding ridiculous. Are names sacred immutable historic markers that shall never be blasphemed, or merely vague markers to give a beer the most context available? Sure, sometimes you'll get yelled at for labeling a beer some nonsensical, contradictory, hybrid style, but if you're not taking things too seriously, there's some effortless fun in the unanswerable questions like "How can an India Pale Ale be black?" Sure, why not.

Recently, a bunch of brewers have finally realized that sours are pretty dope when dry-hopped with some viciously fruity tropical hop varieties. I'm not sure why this took so long, other than, I guess, that sours in general weren't all that commonly made until recently. (New Belgium, as far as I know, set the trend a few years ago with Le Terroir, and it's caught on considerably since). "Dry-hoppped sour" works as a label, because it's descriptive of a process. But it doesn't tell you the full story. What type of sour? Are we talking a sour mash / kettle sour situation, or are we dry-hopping a full-on aged lambic-esque sour? Cause there's quite a bit of difference in those two things. "Sour" in general could be so many things. We could be dealing with a dry-hopped Flanders situation, a sour stout, a sour saison, an IPA that got infected, and so on. This batch, for instance: without the hops, you would call the base a gose.

At least, due to the fact that lambic-esque aged sours are way more time intensive to produce, you can usually assume that such hoppy sours are of the "quick sour" variety. (If it's an aged sour, they'll be sure to let you know). This batch, for example: I soured it quickly (not exactly a kettle sour, but we'll get to that). While it was a no-boil and no-hop batch up until the end, I did then dry hop it with an aggressive 5 ounces of Nelson Sauvin, and it drinks like it. Remarkably so. Is it a hoppy sour? A sour IPA? Or is it still a gose, as the base beer would have been had I never added hops?

Whatever it is, I could live inside this beer.

I love the concept of dry-hopped sours, in general. As I toyed with above, you can go in so many different directions with the concept, and if you're not pulling out bitterness, you have little clash of character to fear. A whole range of hop aromas seem to work well over the base of a sour, but the tropical fruity notes of new-wave modern hops are particularly well suited.

I suspected that Nelson Sauvin would go like gangbusters over a tart juicy gose foundation, and it really, really does. Nelson is one of my all-time favorite hops, but it's so unique and distinct that I find it doesn't always pair well with others. It's one of the few hops that I feel often works best as a single-hop addition, because it's already crazy complex, crazy distinct, and there are just very few other hops that can even squeeze within its realm of flavor. Specifically, I usually get a tart gooseberry fruit character from it, dry and succulent — the reason you hear those white wine descriptors tossed about for it. Since there's no bitterness, there's no clash between the hops and the sourness whatsoever — they work  in perfect harmony, tart and juicy characteristics enhancing the best of each other. I find it interesting how well-preserved and distinct the character of the Nelson remains: in Brett IPAs, the yeast almost always rearranges and chews through the hops, ultimately shaping them into something different. Here, the hops still come out the other end as they were before. Weird old Nelson retains its weird old Nelsonishness.

As with my last batch of gose, which got fruit instead of hops, I did not sour mash this or kettle sour it, the way you typically would. I just pitched my house culture of mixed lactobacillus strains, let those go on their own for two days at room temperature, and then followed up with a pitch of Brettanomyces to ferment the beer to terminal gravity. This one finished low, much lower than my last gose, and so the ABV ended up on the high side of what I was planning for. The cooler temps (room temp is pretty cool compared to what most would sour at), but I find the final result ends up right where I want it. This isn't the most acidic thing ever, but it's got a solid lactic sourness to it, moreso than most gose or Berliner Weisse. While you may not be pumping the lacto up at their max temp for the max effort, the resulting sourness seems a bit smoother and more complex.

Nothing special about how I added the hops. To keep things simple and clean, I didn't run this one through my normal dry hop tank, but I did purge the carboy with CO2 when I added the hops and transferred into the keg. Like I said, the hop character just held up amazingly well, for whatever reason. Nelson Sauvin might be one of my favorite hops, and this might be the best use I've found for it so far.

I don't know that I can pick a favorite between this and my last batch of gose, the kiwi lime zest version that never received any hops at all. Both wildly different beers, both very distinct, but both a wonderful application for the gose base.

As I said with the last one: BRB time for a keg-stand.


Recipe-
5.0 Gal., All Grain
Fermented at room temp, 72 F
OG: 1.040
FG: 1.003
ABV: 4.9%

Malt-
41.4% [#3] Pilsner malt
41.4% [#3] white wheat malt
13.8% [#1] Cara-Pils

3.4% [4 oz] acidulated malt (pH adjustment)

Hop Schedule-
5 oz Nelson Sauvin dry hop for 6 days

Yeast-
House Lactobacillus cultures
House Brettanomyces cultures

Other-
15 g sea salt

Strong Sour Ale with East Coast Yeast Bug Country - Recipe & Tasting Notes

Brewery: Bear Flavored
Style: Sour Ale
Brewed: 5.27.2013
Bottled On: 7.31.14
ABV: 9%

Introducing any type of wild microbes into a beer always means some big potential departures from the well known and easily controlled, at least the first few times around. Sure, you can learn the habits of semi-domesticated, once-wild microbes — at least, you can learn their habits in those specific contexts. But new cultures can always be expected to carve their own path, like water down a mountain. Sometimes the flow just can't be steered, and your well-worn trail gets washed out. Sometimes it's easy to find a source of nice clean water. Sometimes there's a dead squirrel floating down the stream, and you didn't see that coming, did you?

The two versions of White Manna — a pair of tarts saisons I did the other year with two mixed cultures — remain some of my favorite beers that I've made. The Fantome culture didn't develop the acidity early on of the other version, but more and more over time, a soft berry fruit tartness emerged, quite unique among other saisons I've had. I'm so happy I still have a few bottles of each, because watching them develop over time has been just real neat. Real neat.

When deciding to do this strong sour saison for my 50th batch (and my dad's 50th birthday; happy coincidence), I had to decide among my available cultures what might lend the nicest character to a 9ish percent ABV tart sour saison. The blend of Saison II and Fantome dregs that I had used before seemed as good of a choice as any. And so I let the beer do its thing for four or five months.

One thing about being a homebrewer with a decent pipeline of beers in production and a lot going on in life: that early rush to see your aged beers be ready to drink eventually dissolves into a sort of forgetful patience. Or maybe that's just me. Beers that need more tending-to get it, while beers that I know are fine to age for a while often sit quietly in the corner, going about their business as I remind myself that I should really check on them soon, but maybe not tonight, because all these kegs need cleaned and I'm already a few pints deep. Which is to say, I could have easily turned this batch around much, much faster, in retrospect. Still, the way I went about it returned a very interesting beer. If I had packaged it after four months, it would have been another, different, interesting beer. Just ready much sooner. That's often how it is with, especially, wild beers: whatever path down the mountain the fermentation tends to take, there are many possible outcomes that are all interesting. Just interesting in different ways.

After four months, I added honey and sugar to bring the calculated ABV of the batch up to about 9%. This is an easy trick employed by various Belgian styles to keep a beer dry and drinkable and clean and deceptive in its ABV — elementary stuff, but again, I could have added the sugar much earlier, even in the boil itself. Realistically it wasn't going to make a huge difference either way. Three weeks into fermentation versus four months into fermentation was somewhat arbitrary. However: knowing that I was already taking my sweet time with this batch led to another, more serious editing choice.

Right after adding the sugar to re-initiate fermentation, I decided to add another microbe culture. Having some newly-acquired secondhand dregs of East Coast Yeast Bug Country to play around with, I figured: why not?

With the new dregs added in, I figured this might become more of a full-on sour than just a lightly acidic saison, and so ultimately this batch got almost a year to age. Its lifespan offers up a few glimpses of lessons about, I dare say, the lives of sour beers in general.

Most full-on sours with mixed cultures aren't considered done for at least a year, and this is generally a good baseline if you know you're using lambic-like cultures. That is why my procrastination at bottling this until approximately a year after it was brewed didn't seem extreme. If I had meant it to be a full-sour from the start, this would be the normal timeline anyway. Why not have the patience to wait and see what, if anything, would change?

Flash forward to the beer being ready to drink. Yes, I've not really checked up on it for a few months, but I know it should definitely be done by now. There's no sign of a pellicle or anything. Definitely no activity. I could have bottled a while ago, I'm sure. Oh well. It's not as sour or lambic-like as I expected, but it's... interesting. There's a flavor note I can't quite pinpoint, at first. It certainly doesn't taste like the "strong sour saison" I originally intended this to be.

Rather than a brisk, pale saison, I find a profile I have not encountered in many beers previously: sherry.

It's hard to describe the flavor profile of sherry other than "sherry." At first, I couldn't figure out what was going on. Even the color of the beer was darker, though the recipe was essentially the same as other saisons I had done. But that unique sour note.... The flavor of sherry so particular, I might not have even been able to place it had I not randomly bought a bottle of sherry not too long before I brewed this beer, from my friend who runs the fancy schmancy wine store in town. Maybe it's just this particular region, but I can't say I find sherry to be a particularly oft-consumed beverage. (When was the last time you personally consumed sherry?) The flavor of it, though, is very distinct. It's a profile similar to what you might get with a minor acetic backbone, and both depend on the presence of oxygen, to some extent, to arise. Had I allowed this beer too much oxygen due to its overly-long aging process? And how had excess oxygen gotten into a glass carboy?

Now, as I finish this write-up, I can no longer find the description for East Coast Yeast Bug Country online (the results turn up hits for "Bug County", which I assume is a different, newer blend. Al is changing his offerings all the time). But when I was first trying to solve this riddle, I had pulled up the description for the Bug Country blend release, and noted that it contained sherry flor. Ah-ha. This previously mysterious flavor that I hadn't been able to place, clicked into place. I at least understood what I was tasting, now, if not exactly the path the beer had taken.

Perhaps I favored the flor cultures in the blend unintentionally, by feeding the beer in stages with additional sugars; by giving it so much extra time to age; by allowing it the headspace it had, for the months it had once fermentation was otherwise complete. I'm not entirely sure. This is a beer that I don't know that I could reproduce, if I wanted to brew it exactly like this a second time. Which is kind of a shame.

Ultimately, I'm glad this one came out the way it did. No, it's not lambic-like. It's not quite Flanders like either, though that's the style probably closest to it, with that oxidative, semi-acetic influence. Like I said: I've never had another beer that tasted much like this. And since this is an enjoyable, flavorful, surprisingly-drinkable strong sour beer, that's kind of a shame. A lot of things about this batch fascinate me.

After all the aging-pitfalls it's already handily dodged — and at 9% ABV too — this one is set up to age for quite some time. Good thing, as I donated most of the bottles to my dad for his birthday and told him to open them infrequently. Maybe a couple a year. Maybe, once they're down to a sixpack or so, once a year. A beer like this is meant to take the long, winding path of patience.

Wyeast De Bom Golden Sour - Recipe & Tasting Notes

Beer: Wyeast De Bom Golden Sour
Brewery: Bear Flavored
Style: Sour Beer / Farmhouse Ale
Brewed: 8.21.14
Bottled On: 11.13.14
ABV: 5.7%

Appearance: pale straw yellow, orange hues, moderate head, low retention
Smell: apple cider, candied pear, Belgian esters, hormonal lactic funk, apricot
Taste: apple, citrus, candied pear, apricot, clean lactic, mild tangy funk, weird fruit
Mouthfeel: high carb, crisp, med-light body, low bitterness, slight fullness at finish

I'm going to try my hardest to keep this entry short, because holy crap I have a million things I should be working on right now. But before 2014 mercifully draws to an end, I wanted to write about a few experimental beers I brewed much earlier in the year. Plus, this batch doesn't require a lengthy introduction, as the premise is pretty no-duh: Wyeast put out a new sour blend as part of its "Summer Sours" Private Collection, and I was compelled to test it out. Pretty self explanatory.

The De Bom blend appealed to me a lot more than some of the other pre-mixed blends yeast companies release, simply because it was playing to a realm of beer that I've been dabbling with a lot in the last few years: deconstructed, quick-fermenting sours. Full-on sour blends are obviously great fun, but I only really have the space to keep a few of them going at a time — testing out every new re-arranged mix of microbes simply isn't an option. But I'm particularly fond of sour saisons / sour farmhouse ales and the way their simple stacking of flavors can create totally different impressions of balance simply by shifting one corner of the balance pyramid slightly. Lactic punch here instead of there? Different beer. Soft versus sharp? Different beer. Funk-crusted versus bright lemon tartness? Different beer.

I had suspected that De Bom was Wyeast attempting to recreate the character of Cascade's highly regarded sours, which, unlikely as it may sound, are not pitched with Brettanomyces and sour only through the action of lactobacillus. So in addition to simply being another random blend, it promised a possible glimpse into one of America's more interesting sour beer producers. 

Wyeast doesn't give the exact composition of this blend, but they do say that De Bom is intended to create "sour ale profiles but in a fraction of the time required by previous, less manly cultures." A new quick sour blend with some unknown microbial agents: awesome. For best results, they recommend: "no O2/aeration at beginning of fermentation; periodic dosing with O2 during fermentation to stimulate ethyl acetate production; frequent sampling to monitor development and complexity. Under optimum conditions, beers can be ready for consumption in 1-2 months."

The ability to sour quickly with an aggressive strain of bacteria is a nice tool to have. Now, Wyeast also happened to release the lactobacillus Brevis strain as part of its Summer Sours collection, and it is rumored that Brevis is, indeed, the Cascade strain (caveat: this speculation is based on my vague memories of some internet conjecture, and may be entirely false). This could be entirely a coincidence, or, as I took it with some liberal reading between the lines, a clue that Brevis was simply paired with a Saccharomyces strain to make a fast-fermenting De Bom culture. So there you go: with enough conjecture and assumption, it might appear to be the case that De Bom = Cascade culture. Or inspired by it. Maybe.

Then again, now that I'm drinking the results, I might want to rescind that hypothesis. Cascade's sours are notoriously acidic and hard-hitting in the pH department, and this homebrewed trial really doesn't carry much of those traits. The taste is somewhere closer to a mild Berliner Weisse on the spectrum of sour things, with an estery yeast profile that dominates the beer more than the mark from its bacteria. It's fruity and weird, like a Belgian pale with tart undertones. There's just no way to pretend this successfully delivered on the potential of a quick-fermenting but fully complex sour ale, though to be fair, there could be various process reasons for that.

For one, I brewed this at a friend's house and we left it in his basement for three months, which is longer than the time Wyeast says this culture should require. After three months, it was very clearly stable in gravity. But we didn't follow the hand-holding procedure that Wyeast suggests for this, the unorthodox method of "periodic dosing with O2 during fermentation to stimulate ethyl acetate production." I kind of overlooked that advice at the time, but in retrospect, I'm simply confused as to what it's meant to achieve. Ethyl acetate is responsible for solvent and nail polish remover characteristics, which are not desirable qualities so far as I know. Am I having a brain fart, or missing something here? I feel like I must be — frankly, with only two weeks left in 2014, and 2014 being absolutely the most stressful and silly and anxiety-inducing year of my life, this wouldn't be surprising. I'm absolutely fried! And I have read that ethyl acetate can also come across as fruity or pear-like, so maybe there's some chemistry here that I just don't understand. I'm not very good at chemistry even when I'm not fried! If you can educate me on what my cheese-addled mind is failing to grasp here, please do let me know.

Secondly, mixed cultures work very well in aged sours, but I think I prefer to keep cultures separate in the case of beers like this (quick sours). Deconstructed, one could pitch the lactobacillus alone, initially, giving it a head start by a day or two, and with the right equipment, ferment at an elevated temperature favoring the bacteria, before pitching any yeast. Here, with the culture mixed, fermenting at 110 F for 24 hours probably wouldn't be an option.

Since I haven't had any other beer made with De Bom, I don't know if the character could have turned out drastically different given other conditions and process variables, but my intuition is that this is a fairly accurate representation of its profile. Frankly, I can't really decide how much I like it; every sip I go back and forth, from "this is pretty good!" back to "this is kind of weird in a way I can't put my finger on!" Ultimately, the oddest thing about this for me may be that it tastes bizarrely sweet, despite finishing relatively dry and relatively tart. There's a lot of mouthfeel, almost too much slickness in the body, which I blame on my generic sour recipe that uses 30% wheat in the grist. And then the flavor itself is decidedly cidery, which is something I often get in a beer fermented with a fruity yeast (often Belgian yeast) that has just a bit of tartness to it. If the lactobacillus in this blend had pushed out a bit more acidity, or the yeast had dried the beer out more, I think it would come across as more balanced to me, but I can also see the general public really enjoying this one. It's extremely fruity in a unique way, sweet enough to appeal to the American palate, and yet tart enough to become refreshing and multi-dimensional. It works. I can't decide how I personally feel about it, but it works. And its weird in ways that I have a hard time describing, which is cool. Like I said: I find it fascinating that the same basic character elements can stack up in different ways to make a totally different beer. I don't know that this is the way I would prefer to stack them personally, for the type of balance I find most appealing, but whatever arrangement they're in here, it's a nice option to have.

I said before this would be a short entry. I'm really bad at that.


Recipe-
Brewed 8.21.14
Bottled On: 11.13.14
Batch: 5 Gal
Mashed at 148 degrees for 60 minutes
Fermented at basement temp, 74 - 76 F
OG: 1.054
FG: 1.010
ABV: 5.7%

Malt-
70% [#7] Pilsner malt
30% [#3] white wheat

Hop Schedule-
0.5 oz Nugget @0 min

Yeast-
Wyeast 3203 De Bom Sour Blend

No-Hop, No-Boil, Lime-Zest & Kiwi Gose - Recipe & Tasting Notes

Beer: Alagoas
Brewery: Bear Flavored
Style: Gose
Brewed: 8.05.14
Kegged On: 9.06.14
ABV: 4.2%

Appearance: golden yellow, slight haze, ample head, good retention
Smell: lime, citrus, lemon, lactic sour, mild funk
Taste: lime, lemon, upfront lactic sour, rounder soft fruits, tangy acidity, slight salty finish
Mouthfeel: high carb, light body, crisp, puckering lingering sour in finish

Perhaps being the Fermented Man has its advantages as far as my control of bacteria, or perhaps the lactobacillus strains I welcomed into my house last year have gotten a whole lot more comfortable since I began inviting so many of their peers to party. Whatever the reason, I took an even bigger gamble with this summer's "quick sour" beer, but in spite of the added difficulty, the result is far more delicious than any of last year's attempts. If I'm feeling really generous, I might even go ahead and call this one of my favorite batches of sour beer that I've made.

Why did I decide to do a sour, salty gose with kiwis and lime zest to be ready just in time for late September? Let's pretend it's not just because I don't have very good organizational skills to keep my brewing schedule on track and say it's a f*** you to July-released pumpkin beers via reverse seasonal creep. Sure.

There was actually a brief window in which I considered dumping this batch, funnily enough. Not because it tasted bad or anything, but because I thought my sheer, glaring negligence must have ruined it in some way. I had always wanted to do this as a gose with no hops added and no boil — just run straight off the sparge into a keg. I would then purge the keg of oxygen because kegs are really great for that kind of thing, and oxygen is bad for sour mashes and can lead to domination by bacteria that make your beer smell like puke. I've tested out various methods to avoid this with last year's Bearliner Weisse and a few other previous brews, but the basic strategy is pretty straightforward: avoid oxygen when doing something like a sour mash and using bacteria from raw grain. 

A keg is the perfect way to purge oxygen from headspace and keep it out. But you'll have to excuse my short-sightedness here: this summer was, quite frankly, a bit rough. I was a little fried, a lot stressed, distracted, and disoriented. And it didn't occur to me until I already had the not-boiled wort in the keg: what would happen if the bacteria started kicking off a lot of CO2?

My original plan beyond this point was not to rely on just the lactobacillus from the grains (whatever survived the mash, since I wasn't boiling anything at any point), but to pitch some of my house culture to ensure ample souring. As this was all happening in early August, I even thought about putting the keg of souring wort in my car for a day, which was the hottest location I could think of at the time. But okay: what if I put the keg in my car and it started fermenting furiously? Not all strains of lactobacillus produce much CO2 — there are homofermentative strains and heterofermentative strains, but it's hard to know which you have, especially when, like me, you planned to pitch a blend of house cultures. And while I could check on the keg fairly frequently to pull the pressure relief valve, I suddenly didn't feel very comfortable about those sporadic purgings of CO2 build-up being the only thing between me and a car bomb.

So I stalled, kind of got busy and distracted and unfocused, and the wort / beer sat in the keg in my apartment for a few days without any additional microbes pitched. Once or twice a day I would pull the pressure relief valve to vent any built-up gas that might be accumulating, should some spontaneous fermentation be occurring. After a day or two it was clear that there was no gas building up, and therefore likely not much fermentation happening. Should I pitch bacteria into the keg anyway and just keep on pulling the pin, hoping that would be enough? Or should I just transfer the whole thing into a bucket, even though that maybe defeats the point of my oxygen-avoidance plan in the first place? And should I be worried about some sort of unfriendly microbe taking up residence in the wort due to the multiple days it sat without fermentation to ward off hostiles? Cthulhu knows I've read plenty about botulism this year, and still haven't been able to determine exactly why it never seems to be a concern in unfermented wort. While debating the safety of this batch — and yes, even briefly considering dumping it — I reminded myself that many breweries buy wort and ship it in sealed containers. In Europe especially, a lot of this packaged wort is destined for lambic production, where the full onset of fermentation may not occur for a few days. There are definitely situations out there where it sounds like botulism should be a concern, and yet I've never heard of anyone dying of botulism from beer (have you?). My guess is that the pH of wort even before fermentation may already be too low or something. In either case, I had also added 14.5 grams of sea salt to this batch, it being a gose, and with that added buffer, I decided I'd once again embrace my destiny as a death-defying, botulism-dodging crazy-person badass and go for it.

[Editor's note: Speaking of which, while I have your attention — please consider pre-ordering my book, which will allow me to tackle even more crazy experiments, and allow you to read about them. In addition, if you'd like to drink some of my crazy experiments, such as this gose and many other sours, I'll be hosting a book reading preview party / fermentation sampling event next May. I will go out of my way to ensure epicness. Sign up for it now via my IndieGogo dealy. Okay, thanks, cheers, back to the brewing!]

The exact fermentation of this gose would be hard to replicate for anyone lacking the means to break into my apartment and steal some of the jars I keep sitting around, as much of my souring cultures are not available commercially, and, I'm guessing, have mutated quite a bit as I've maintained them and let them adapt to their new bear-focused environment. However, with this batch, I did introduce Lactobacillus brevis, newly available from Wyeast, to the cocktail. But in general, I've found that I'm getting a much cleaner, rounder, fuller lactic sourness from letting the lacto do its thing over time, rather than trying to pump it up for a frenzied, brief sour mash period.

As this entry is already getting long, I won't get into how brewers have this weirdly intense fear of letting lactobacillus survive in their beers... even brewers who are otherwise happy to embrace Brettanomyces. We'll save that one for another day. But as you may have noticed, this beer was never boiled or in any way pasteurized (other than from the temperature of the mash itself), and so the bacteria remained very much alive throughout and to the present. I don't find any danger of lactobacillus making the beer "too sour" or something; but then again, I like my Berliners and gose to have a very full tangy sourness. (For comparison, if you've had Westbrook Gose, I would say the sour character in this batch of Alagoas is very comparable). Nor does letting lactobacillus live require extended aging periods, in my experience. I always add Brettanomyces to my quick sours, and even so, they're done after about a month. Speaking of which: why add Brett when there's already so much going on here? The main danger of having an aggressive sourness in a beer like this is that Saccharomyces could stall out due to the pH level falling too low before it can fully attenuate. Brett is much more pH tolerant, and will help the beer finish out dry; at least, that's the idea. This finished out at 1.008, which might be on the high side for the style, but has the benefit of providing some body and balance that a drier version might otherwise lack.

Finally, what says "October" better than kiwis and lime zest? I had 2 lbs of kiwis sitting in my freezer for months that I was just waiting to use for something, and while I knew they wouldn't add much character (especially at that very low ratio — typically I'd add fruit at 1 lb per gal. or more) I figured I'd toss them in anyway. I added 2.8 grams of lime zest (and also squeezed out the juice from the limes into the beer as well), targeting about 200 ICUs based on Shaun Hill's scale. The plan was to add more, almost double that, but when I tried the beer a few days after that first addition of zest, the lime aroma was beautiful and the flavor perfectly subtle, supporting of the sourness, it was already exactly what I was looking for. Not wanting this to be an aggressively lime-forward beer, I decided to keep it at that lower dosage and went ahead and kegged the beer.

The result is the most crushable beer I have ever made, and a base I'm looking forward to trying with many other variations of fruit and zest.

BRB time for a keg-stand.


Recipe-
5.0 Gal., All Grain
Double infusion mash at 122 F / 148 degrees F
Fermented at room temp, 72 F
OG: 1.040
FG: 1.008
ABV: 4.2%

Malt-
43% [#3] Pilsner malt
43% [#3] white wheat malt
14% [#1] special roast

Hop Schedule-
N/A

Yeast-
House Lactobacillus cultures

House Brettanomyces cultures

London Ale III

Other-
14.5 g sea salt
2 lbs. kiwi fruit
2.8 g lime zest
juice from 3 limes

Dry-Hopped Sour Farmhouse Ale - Recipe & Tasting Notes

Beer: Goatpants

Brewery: Bear Flavored
Style: Farmhouse Ale
Brewed: 1.06.14
Bottled On: 3.30.14
ABV: 4.4%

Appearance: pale straw yellow, ample head, lingering foam, good retention
Smell: apricot, unripe peach, lemon, lime, grapefruit, funk, dew, tart raspberry
Taste: tart apricot, sour peach, lemon, grapefruit, clean lactic sourness, succulent fruit finish
Mouthfeel: high carb, medium body, slight bite, clean puckering finish

I sometimes wonder how I manage to write a thousand words or so on every freaking beer I brew. Unless there was some kind of jarring mishap along the way, or I'm trying out a new technique, or testing out some totally novel series of ingredients, does every beer need (or deserve?) such elaboration?

No. I'm just really bad at keeping my shit succinct. I have a whole book to write in the next seven - eight months, and I'm not so much worried about cramming all that writing time into my chaotic schedule as keeping it short enough that my editor doesn't murder me.

When drinking Goatpants, a sour farmhouse ale / saison (where I took the rare path of flippancy with my naming schemes), I really don't feel like writing... anything. Maybe in part because I wonder if I should be keeping at least some tricks of my sleeve (nah?), but mostly because I wish I had infinity bottles of this beer (or preferably, cans of this beer), and the fact that I don't causes me to focus on how much I'm enjoying it while I'm drinking it. Maybe it's just that I really love sour farmhouse ales, but this and White Mana are in strong competition for my favorite batches so far. Some of my IPAs are making a strong push too, but I think the batches that I tend to age, savor, and share with as many people as possible, unsurprisingly make a more lasting impression in my memory. And it's no coincidence that my two favorite batches so far were basically shooting for the same target — Goatpants is my attempt to reverse engineer the microbial makeup of White Mana, which used Hill Farmstead saison dregs to achieve its pleasant lactic tartness. I wanted to see if I could build up a house culture to reach the same end.

Complex, long-aged sours are a wonderful thing — there's no beating the complexity of a lambic — but there's something to be said for the paired-down, refreshing pucker of a tart, lively simple sour. When any kind of sour is done right, the succulence triggers that salivation reflex in your mouth that inspires you to keep drinking, like you have to wash down the beer with more of itself. When the beer is light and juicy enough, this refreshing combination is hard to beat.

Essentially, that's what I'm aiming for here. The sourness is on par with a particularly tart Berliner Weisse, but drinks juicier and richer — which is probably a result of the large Citra dry-hop addition this sat on previous to packaging. The saison base gives it a very nice boost in complexity, too, especially for a sour that only aged for a couple months. Another reason I love this style — it doesn't have to have lambic-level complexity, just a distinct farmhouse quality and a pleasant backbone of acidity. Not necessarily easy to achieve, but easier, or at least much faster if you're working with the right microbes.

The right yeast and the right bugs are going to make an excellent beer, but modern brewers, for all their fascination with IPAs, don't yet seem to fully appreciate the relationship between hops and funk. And why do saisons have to be limited to Noble hops? Nothing wrong with those, and they can't be beat for a certain type of saison, but if a vibrant, alive, succulent sourness is your goal, fruity hops work even better than spicy herbal ones, in my humble opinion. I'm far from an expert, and I'm definitely not claiming to have discovered any part of this correlation myself, but seriously: the magical pairing of juicy dry-hops and succulent sourness is simply not exploited often enough. The result is just, like, so much more juice.

But like I said at the beginning, is there much point to me rambling on about my silly personal preferences and the flavor profiles of the beers I make, at length? The most important thing would be any tips I happen to discover along the way. So I was telling you all about how I think the dry-hops helped enhance the juicy vibrant character of this (at least while it's fresh), but probably more important than that subjective observation is the fact that I did not add any hops to the beer at all prior to that point. So yes, the entire boil and fermentation of this beer was strictly 0 IBU, no bitterness or alpha acids or vegetable matter to get in the way of the bacteria. Why? Because I wasn't really looking for bitterness here, so I figured — why not give it a try? I didn't need the boil hops for flavor, and theoretically, at least, they'd only get in the way of the lactobacillus' acidity development.

Was that truly the case, or did I just happen upon a few particularly awesome bacteria strains (and complimentary Brett strains)? We'll see. I saved the dregs, and hopefully those dregs perform as they did the first time. I liked this batch enough that, in fact, I just brewed it again twice this week, but this time I threw some old Citra leaf hops in the whirlpool. After sitting in my freezer for two years, poorly sealed, I don't think they'll contribute enough IBUs to really inhibit the bacteria, but... we'll see. Depending how they pan out, one of the re-brews will definitely be getting some fruit. As my friend pointed out, this beer is absolutely screaming for apricots.


Recipe-
5.25 Gal., All Grain
Brewed 1.06.2014
Mashed at 150 degrees for 60 minutes
Fermented at room temp, 72 F
OG: 1.038
FG: 1.004
ABV: 4.4%

Malt-
78% 2-row malt
11% white wheat malt
11% rye malt

Hop Schedule-
4 oz Citra dry hop for 8 days

Yeast-
White Labs Saison II
Mangrove Jack Belgian Saison
Brett L
Brett Custersianus
Brett Trois
4 Lactobacillus strains*

*Only 2 of the lactobacillus strains I used are commercially available from White Labs and Wyeast. Culture or select strains that will create a nice strong blanket of lactic acid. A blend of strains seems to work much better than a few isolated strains.