I am documenting my experiment here. My challenge is to make a sour beer, and go from brewday to beer glass in under a month. My objective is to make a drinkable sour quickly and not to mimic a classic style. I have the batch started and it is in the basement fermenting now. (I do have three batches of sours tucked away in the basement that have been there for just over a year, so I am doing the old school methods also.)
Brew Date: July 3rd. (Saturday)
Recipe:
50/50 - Belgian Pilsner and American White Wheat. 6Lbs each.
.7 oz Mt Hood hops
White Labs Sour Mix I (and a 1+ year old bag of Wyeast Roselare)
Boiled 90 minutes and transferred @ 5 gallons of cooled and pure O2 aerated wort into a 6 gallon carboy. Added the Sour Mix I and the Roselare directly to the 66F wort. No starter. Placed the carboy in fermentation area and set the temp to 68F. Active fermentation started by the next day.
July 7th (Wednesday)
Transferred the beer to the secondary carboy. I did this early because I wanted yeast activity to help scrub the O2 from the cherry puree I was going to add. I also wanted the beer off the bulk of the trub at the bottom of the fermentor because I will be cranking the heat in a few days.
So far I've added six soup size cans of Oregon Brand Tart Cherries (in water, no added sugar or preservatives). I might buy 4 more to total 10, however at $3/can it is getting spendy. The canned cherries were whole so I put them in the blender and pureed them a bit. Lots of O2 added at this step.
I left the controller set to 68 because I want the yeast to continue to consume the sugars and go dormant. I don't want to have a lot of active yeast when I turn up the temp. I think the yeast would start producing fusel alcohols if I heated the mixture up at this time.
July 9th (Friday)
This morning I turned the heat up just a bit. The controller is at 74F. I am going to let it sit at 74 for at least 24 hours and then I am going to turn the heat up to 86F. I am using fish tank heaters and a big tub to control my temperature so I can't really go past 86F with this set-up.
My plan is to leave the beer at 86 and watch the fermentation lock. My guess is that it will only take a couple of days for the airlock to go quiet. The bacteria will continue to work but my assumption will be that most of the sugars will be consumed at this point. I think I'll leave the mixture at 86 for five or six days to let the bacteria work on the cherries, and then cut the heat and let it cool and settle for a few more days.
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Update
July 11th (Sunday)
This evening I turned up the heat to 86F. Tasted a sample tonight and it was very dry, almost no flavor, slight bret flavor and no sour at all. More or less what I expected.
July 13th (Tuesday)
Temp is holding steady at 86F and the fermentation lock is steadily but slowly bubbling away. The beer is a fairly uniform translucent pink color and it smell good.
July 18th (Sunday)
Tasted it after a week at 86-90F. It actually tasted pretty good. No real sour in the flavor. I was kind of surprised at the lack of lactic acid at this point. I did get cherry, malt and a slight Belgian yeast flavor. There is still CO2 being produced and the wort is opaque so I remain optimistic. I am going to let it do its thing for at least another week.
July 25th (Sunday)
After another week I was hoping to keg, but I tasted it Sunday evening and there wasn't much in the way of sour. I'm not calling it an Epic Fail because the beer is actually pretty good. It has a light dry body with a pleasant amount of yeast derived flavors. Flavors of dark fruit and just a bit of that wild yeast horse blanket. The actual Tart Cherry fruit comes through nicely. It does taste nicely of tart cherry.
I thought about kegging it and drinking it at this point but I decided to wait at least another week.
I'll add to this thread as I make process changes.
Private First Class BN ARMY 