Brewing Hoppier Sours for Aging: Barrels of Rings

This is the first in a series of posts each covering an aspect of brewing mixed-fermentation barrel-aged beers where my opinions have changed significantly since I wrote American Sour Beers. Each post will focus on our process, recipe, and results for one of the beers in the Sapwood Cellars Shipping Club. This one covers Barrels of Rings, aka our 40 IBU hazy pale ale (Rings of Light) fermented in barrels with house microbes, then dry hopped with Citra Cryo.

The longer I brew mixed-fermentation beers, the more I appreciate just how important the hopping rate is. Controlling lactic acid production by inhibiting lactobacillus is hops' most well-appreciated function in sour beers. Hop compounds become more effective at inhibiting Lactobacillus as the pH drops, creating a natural "limit" on their lactic acid production. What it took me a long time to appreciate was how much hop compounds (beyond IBUs) lead to a greater expression of what I think of as classic Brett "funk."

When Scott and I began the mixed-fermentation program in 2018-2019, generally our issue was beers not souring enough. I started pulling levers (lower hopping rates, higher mash temps, less attenuative primary strains etc.) By 2020-2021, we were having excessive acid production... Most non-fruited beers were dropping to a firmly-acidic 3.1-3.3 pH, while fruited beers were often difficult to drink in quantity at 3.0-3.1 pH with some dipping to "obnoxiously acidic" high-2s. 

Fruit contributes simple sugars, which Lactobacillus love, and at the same time dilute the hop compounds in the beer. This can cause a precipitous pH drop. With so much beer already in barrels, my first maneuver was to begin dosing alpha acids into the beer along with fruit when there was already enough acid. We started with reduced iso-alpha-acids (e.g. tetralone/hexalone), but have moved onto Hopsteiner Alpha Extract 20% since it doesn't add perceived bitterness. About .1-.2 g per gallon stops acid production for our bacteria. These products don't significantly change the flavor or add additional aromatic complexity. As a side benefit, they enhance head retention. A small dry hop at this stage would be another option if you wanted stop acidification and add hop aromatics.

 

At this point we started upping the aged hop rate, or aiming for higher IBU targets when using fresh hops (~15-20 IBUs). At the same time (~2021) Scott and Ken (our head brewer) wanted to try barrel-aging more aromatically hoppy beers... I was resistant. I love hoppy-sour beers, I did a whole talk about them at the 2016 National Homebrewers Conference. Generally my approach had been to make sure the hops go into the beer as close to serving as possible (e.g., dry hop a barrel-aged sour after aging, brew a quick-turn hoppy Brett saison, add a whirlpool addition after kettle souring). I'd tasted too many barrel-soured IPAs and pale ales from great breweries that smelled like "old hoppy beer." That said, Ken and Scott convinced me! At our scale it is a relatively low risk to divert a few barrels of pale ale to see what happens.

We're already "aggressive" with our measures against oxygen pick-up (purging barrels with carbon dioxide before filling, purging the barrel-tool between each fill, purging the bottles before filling etc.), but when we fill barrels with pale ale wort we pull out all the tricks. Most importantly, we selected barrels that could be refilled without rinsing, leaving several gallons of "house culture" at the bottom of each. Our goal was to start the secondary fermentation as quickly as possible to protect the delicate hop compounds. I was amazed how good the resulting beer tasted!

What has really intrigued me is that the hoppier bases have almost universally produced finished beers I'd describe as more Brett-forward (earthy, funky, fruity, horse blanket). What I don't know is why! In American Sour Beers I cited research that Brett can free glycosides in hops, so that could explain the fruity. Maybe hops are just inhibiting Lactobacillus, giving the Brett a healthier environment (in lambics Brett tends to thrive before Pediococcus dramatically lowers the pH). Maybe I'm just being fooled and higher hopping rates (aged or fresh) are adding key compounds that I associate with the "funk" in a Cantillon, Orval (and many of my favorite American mixed-ferms)! These days our typical hopping rate is .5 lbs/bbl of aged hops at the start of the boil, and .5 lbs/bbl or fresh low alpha-acid hops in the whirlpool. 

Barrels of Rings is one of the bottles included with the first shipment of the Sapwood Cellars Shipping Club. It started as Rings of Light, brewed summer 2022, racked into barrels after primary fermentation, but before dry hopping. After 10 months of aging, we transfer directly from the two wine barrels into our blending tank (purged with 5.5 pounds of our selected Citra Cryo already in there). We agitated/roused and allowed to settle for a couple days, dropping the hops. Then we primed with sugar and rehydrated wine yeast (as we do for most of our barrel-aged sours) and partially carbonated the beer. As with the barrel fill, we're relying on CO2 purging of the bottles and the rapid refermentation to scavenge oxygen and preserve hop aromatics. 

Recipe: Barrels of Rings

OG: 1.063

65% Briess Brewer's 2-row

14% Great Western Malted White Wheat

13% Grain Millers Flaked Oats

8% Best Chit Malt

IBUs: 40

.5 lbs/bbl Meridian @ Whirlpool (212F)

1 lb/bbl New York Cascade @ Whirlpool (180F)

Bravo Salvo Hop Extract @ Whirlpool (180F)

Fermentation with Omega Cosmic Punch (the barrel sheet below is incorrect)

FG (Primary) 1.022

Brewed 8/5/22. Barrels filled 8/11/22 

Barrel #6: Fifth-fill Chambourcin red wine barrel that previously held our original barrel-aged pale ale, Measure Twice. That barrel was started with dregs from our collab with Free Will (Erma Extra), but along the way it was filled with bases that had dregs in primary from various American saisons (Casey and Holy Mountain).

Barrel #125: Second-fill Chardonnay white wine barrel that previously held a cider fermented with the Bootleg Biology Biology Mad Fermentationist Saison (plus we added the dregs from a stellar bottle of Barrique Wet Hop Reserve after filling).

6/21/23 116 gallons of beer from the two barrels transferred onto 5.5 pounds of 2022 Citra Cryo. 1.5 oz/gallon.

Carbonated to 2.05 vol, reyeasted with Premier Cuvee (rehydrated on a stir-plate with StartUp Nutrient), primed with enough glucose to add 1.1 vol of CO2 (~3.1 vol total in bottle). 

Final pH: 3.65

Final Gravity 1.009

7.1% ABV. 

Tasting Notes: Barrels of Rings

(My personal notes from a few months ago)

Smell - Nice blend of citrus (orange) and earthy-Bretty-funk. Still really fresh, no oxidative or old-hop aromatics. Really varied nose with a little pine sap, hay, and melon. Another hoppy base that got funkier than most of our bases. 

Appearance - Big dense white head, good retention. Light haze, very pale yellow.  Attractive. 

Taste - Light lemony tartness, but not sour-sour. Very saison-y. Some bitterness, but it doesn’t clash with the light bitterness. 

Mouthfeel - A touch of astringency. Great sptrizy carbonation. Medium-light body. 

Drinkability - Really nice. The bitterness does give it a different impression than a classic low-bitterness sour base. More saison-like. 

Changes for Next Time - Really good, not much to change on this one. Gin barrels would be fun. 

When visiting Epochal Barrel Fermented Ales in Scotland last year I was blown-away by how by how good (owner/brewer) Gareth Young's wild ales were aged on whole hops in the barrels for the entire secondary fermentation. I really enjoyed the first beer we did with it, Violet You're Turning Violet (Mosaic in the barrel, finished with a blend of wild and cultivated blueberries). It seems like a good option especially if you want variety in the hop intensity of a base, e.g., start with a more moderate hopped base and add hops to some barrels for blending options. 

Did I Wreck Sour Beer in America?

My book, American Sour Beers, is turning ten next month! I wrote it from the perspective (and experience) of a homebrewer. I wanted to experiment and learn. I really didn't know much about brewing commercially, creating consistent blends, adapting recipes as a barrel program matured, developing flavors that would sell etc. Looking back I have to ask, did my book help launch 1,000 barrel programs, without providing the knowledge brewers actually needed to succeed?

Over the last decade American craft brewing had an explosion of breweries ramping up barrel-aged sour production, followed by a pretty rapid decline (including multiple mid-sized breweries closing their programs and sour-focused breweries closing). Part of that is the inherently less-predictable nature of mixed-fermentation (when you order a cherry sour beer, what are you expecting? Kriek, cherry juice, cherry vinegar etc.). Compare that to a bourbon-barrel vanilla-bean stout where you have a pretty good idea of what the intent was. I suspect at least part of it was the oversaturation of the market combined with the high prices.

Despite brewing my first sour beer in 2006, becoming a brewery consultant in 2011, writing a book in 2014, and opening a brewery in 2018... I haven't been consistently happy with the barrel-aged mixed-fermentations I made until the last couple years. I certainly never released a beer that I thought was bad, but there were certainly had batches that were too sour, muddled, under/over carbonated, or just didn't "pop." During that time we've also released some amazing beers that I still love!

At Sapwood Cellars we've relied on our local club members, and the people who walk in the door to buy ~10,000 bottles of barrel-aged sour beer a year. That may sound like a lot, but it's less than 5% of our production (and we're a pretty small brewery). There really hasn't been much interest in barrel-aged sour bottles in our limited distribution range. They tend to be beers that sell best when you can explain them directly to the drinker, rather than just have them sitting on a shelf! If only there was a way I could talk directly to beer drinkers interested in sour beer...

Rather than bury the lead more than I already have, Sapwood Cellars barrel-aged mixed-fermentation sours are now available for shipping within much of America through a Membership Club administered by Tavour! Shipping is available to: WA, CA, OR, NM, NV, CO, MN, NY, DC, CT, NE, MA, FL, PA, NH, NJ, ID, TX, KS, IN, WI, MO, IA, IL, MI, ND, VA, RI, NC, SC, and MD.

The first installment of the club is $146 (including shipping) for one 500 mL bottle each of six beers: 

Growth Rings 2023: Three-year-blend of barrel-aged Sours, essentially our cuvee of bases, barrels, and microbes showing off our house character. This one isn't refermented with wine yeast, so the dregs would be a good option if you are looking for microbes! It was the second highest-rated "Gueuze" on Untappd in 2023!

Barrels of Rings: Our pale ale base, mixed-fermented in wine barrels and then dry hopped right before bottling. Citrusy-funky with restrained acidity.

Jammiest Bit: Our homage to Hommage, a barrel-aged sour on loads of sour pie cherries and red raspberries. Fruity, funky, tart etc.

Botanicia: A blend of pale sours aged in gin barrels that we then infused with dried limes and quinine. A weird play on a gin-and-tonic... but with a lot more acidity and funk!

Elliptical Orbit 2023: A continuation of the "Dark Funky Saison" series still with my original collaborator and homebrew buddy Alex. For this one he roasted Geisha coffee beans and we infused the barrel-aged dark sour with Geisha cascara (dried coffee cherries). 

Fruit of Many Uses: We sequentially racked the same barrel-aged tart/funky base onto second-use Chardonnay wine grapes, cherries, raspberries, and white nectarines. All of the fruit was whole/local.

Over the next couple weeks I'll be posting my detailed tasting notes on each of the beers, along with recipes, lessons learned, and suggestions for brewing something similar at home! I'll repeat for each club release, assuming enough people sign-up for the club to make it viable. 

Over the last five years it isn't "one simple trick" we learned that improved our beer. It's the accumulation of 100 little things from ingredient selection, to blending, to process refinement, to equipment that we've figured out. It's sitting down with each beer, drinking, thinking, taking detailed notes, and iterating. So much of it is not doing it by myself, having Scott, Ken, and Spencer to push to do things I wouldn't have (Botanica was Ken's baby, and Barrels of Rings was Scott's). Both are delicious, and they are certainly beers I would not have brewed if it was all up to me!

Lessons from Five Years of Bugs, Barrels, and Brewing

This July marks five years since I left my day job with the federal government to brew full-time. We filled our first barrel with mixed-fermentation saison before opening the tasting room at Sapwood Cellars. Since then, we are up to 80 oak barrels with a dedicated suite for mixed-fermentation. So, I thought it would be a good time to sit down and reflect on the lessons that Scott and I have learned over the years! The things we got right, the things we got wrong, and where we are going from here!

Luckily, we've had a pretty good run so far! We've cultivated a great group of supporters in our Wood Club. Neologism (gin-barrel-aged Cascade/Simcoe Cryo dry-hopped pale sour) was named one of Craft Beer & Brewing's Top-20 beers of 2022 by way of winning a massive blind tasting. Despite the pandemic we've been able to modestly expand (production, staff, and space)! We're even shipping beers around the US through Tavour!

I recently realized that Google discontinued Feedburner in 2021... which is why you haven't gotten an email from me in a while. I've changed The Mad Fermentationist over to a new email service, so if you've signed up you should get emails for new posts going forward! If you want more emails from me, I write the near-weekly Sapwood Newsletter (with details on new beers often including info on ingredients, process, and equipment)!

The Things We Got Right

Diverse Microflora - It is certainly simpler to have a single "house" culture. It allows for relatively worry-free blending, but doesn't leave as much room for unique flavors. Maintaining multiple cultures, we have to worry about the microbes from one barrel over-attenuating in the bottle if they are more attenuative than others in the blend. However, the variety of flavors expressed and the options for blending is worth the effort at our scale. We've been even happier since we started selecting our favorite barrels and using them to inoculate subsequent batches. Now we can select which character fits a pale sour vs. a sour red. 

Last week we blended our second batch of Growth Rings (three year blend). To ensure all the microbes have time to get to know each other, we blended the four barrels (all different pale base beers) into a tote. They'll sit there for a couple months to ensure the gravity is stable before priming and bottling. 

Balancing Planning and Creativity - We started 2023 with a rough timeline of the 20 or so barrel-aged mixed-ferm we'll release. However, when we fill barrels there generally isn't a specific plan for which barrel will be in which beer. Pale, wine-barrel-aged beer can be delightful on it's own, or serve as a great base of fruit, herbs, or dry hopping. When we taste them, we get to decide what will make the best possible beer. However, it's also nice to have unique bases/barrels earmarked for a particular purpose. Some examples of those include Opulence (sour red with dried sour cherries in the bourbon and red wine barrels), a Brett'd Belgian Tripel in Calvados (apple brandy), or Port barrels for There Are No Edges (Vin de Céréale).

Tracking Barrels - Using Google Sheets has worked out well for us. I can sort based on fill date, final gravity, base beer etc. It allows me to sit on my couch at home and look at what beers we have in need of fruit, blending, packaging etc. Barrels still fall through the cracks (nothing is more heartbreaking than tasting a barrel that is old/stale and seeing a note about how good it was six months ago). Sometimes a beer is delicious, it just doesn't fit into a blend.

Blending with Others - Whether it is our tasting room manager (Spencer), Lead Brewer (Ken), homebrewing friends, fellow brewers (e.g., the brewers from Other Half for a collab) etc. Tasting barrels with other people helps improve your palate, riff on ideas, and make more broadly appealing results. We all have flavor "blind spots" and it is a good idea to have other people looking too. It's fun to riff off other people's ideas and come up with flavor combinations that neither of you would have made on your own. 

Packaging - Our general approach to packaging has been a big success... once we started measuring the dissolved CO2 in the beer rather than relying on time/temperature/pressure. We blend barrels or transfer fruited beers to our blending tank and cold crash. The day before bottling we'll push in sugar (boiled in water) along with Premier Cuvee champagne yeast (rehydrated with a small amount of Start-Up/GoFerm nutrient). We then carbonate the beer to ~2 vol of CO2, with the sugar and yeast taking the beer the rest of the way. We fill on a bottler (XpressFill) that purges and counter-pressure fills. So far it's resulted in relatively quick/clean refermentations with reliable carbonation. 

The Things We Got Wrong

Not Allocating Time - It is easy to put-off barrel-aged beers for more pressing concerns. When there are DIPAs to dry hop, Pilsners to can, and excises taxes to exercise the sour beers are often pushed to the side. It's rare that a week or two of aging in one direction or another makes a dramatic difference... but it's hard to get the most out of a barrel program if it is always at the bottom of the priority list. We're getting better at it, but I still wish from the start I'd blocked off a specific time/day each week to taste barrels, trial blends, source ingredients, prop microbes etc. 

Over-Correcting - Initially we weren't getting enough acidity in some of our beers, so we started pulling levers... colder rinsing barrels, lower hopping rates etc. Then our beers started becoming too sour, so we started veering back in the other direction. Managing a barrel program is like driving a cruise ship, it is difficult to pivot quickly! It's difficult to step back and tell if there is something causing one specific batch from being too sour (or not sour enough) or if there is a systemic issue. 

I think we would have been well served to do a better mix starting early (some barrels cold or no-rise, more with just Brett etc.). This would have given us more options when it came to blending over- or under-soured beers. 

Appreciating the Impact of Fruit On Acidity - Early on to help out some of those under-acidified beers, we went onto fruit. I was surprised how little additional acidity they picked up from refermentation. Sure adding a really acidic fruit (e.g., black currants for Fellow Feeling) contributed acidity, but just refermenting on wine grapes or peaches did not. However, as our cultures "matured" we suddenly had beers dropping from a tart pH of 3.5 to an obnoxiously-acidic 3.0 after going onto the fruit (2.8 pH was the lowest I measured). That's despite pitching rehydrated wine yeast to ensure a healthy and quick refermentation. 

I thought maybe our resident lactic acid bacteria were becoming more hop tolerant, and the dilution of the beer with fruit was allowing them to kick into action. To test this we began adding a small amount of hop extract with the fruit (we use a 20% alpha extract from Hopsteiner). Our fruited beers stopped dropping pH nearly as much, and as an added benefit the head retention improved considerably. 

Hot Side Hopping - I didn't appreciate how much of the classic funky lambic/saison profile originates with the hops. While we've always used a "restrained" dose of aged hops at the start of the boil (~.5 lbs/bbl), that just wasn't enough to give the beers the aromatic depth I was looking for. Recently we've been experimenting with a similar size whirlpool addition of cold-stored hops. So far the results are promising! I should have noticed that many of my favorite homebrewed Brett Saisons had big whirlpool additions and/or dry hopping... but those were all relatively quick turn-around and not barrel-aged. I'm glad Scott and Ken pushed to age some of our pale ales (pre-dry hopping) in barrels, an idea I wasn't excited about... but the results have been really delicious!

Where We Are Headed

Barrel-aged sour beer seems to be a wide/shallow market at the moment. The people who love them are still searching them out, but the average beer drinker seems to have moved on to less "challenging" more "reliable" styles. It's hard to know how much the rapid expansion of the segment played into this loss of interest. I've heard of quite a few breweries down-sizing or eliminating barrel-aged sour beers... Luckily we still have 150 people in our Wood Club, which is a great way for us to get these beers into the hands of our biggest supporters and a base-level of sales for eight releases a year. We're aiming to make our mixed-ferm beers more "delicious" the sorts of beers that people want to drink a whole bottle of, not just drink an ounce or two at a share. 

However, as we've ramped up the mixed-ferm bottle release schedule (2019 - 8, 2020 -11, 2021 - 13, 2022 - 16, and hopefully ~20 in 2023) we occasionally have bottles to spare. Rather than distribute them locally, we've partnered with Tavour (which ships to many states).  They just released Homegrown Rule, a "Marylanbic" base with homegrown lemon verbena (from my yard) and pineapple sage (from Ken's garden). It's tart and snappy, with plenty of our house microbe character, augmented by the citrusy-green notes of the herbs. 

Liquor, Barrel, and Wood-Aged Brown Ale

Most of the events I do are 30-60 minutes, perfect for talking (ideally including questions from the audience). A few years ago I taught intro-to-homebrewing classes for LivingSocial, I quickly learned that 150 minutes was too long for a lecture alone. I added an extract brewing pantomime to demonstrate the key steps in wort production, brought ingredients to taste and smell, and loaded up with slides with photos to hold the audience's attention.

When Brew Your Own asked me to present on sour beers and barrels for their Boot Camp series, I knew I had to come up with ways to make it interactive to fill six hours! Obviously some of the time is me talking and flipping through slides and answering questions, but I wanted to mix in drinking and action. I've honed the sessions in Burlington and Santa Rosa, and I'm looking forward to the next two November in Indianapolis and February in San Diego!

Sour Beer Techniques
   Overview of wort production for sour beers
   Microbe selection, propagation, harvesting
   Capturing wild microbes
   Tasting and blending teas, tinctures, juices, wines, meads etc. into sours
   Tasting and blending three of my homebrewed sours
   Working with me on a custom sour beer recipe

Barrel and Wood Aging
   Discussion of barrel-aging and wood-aging techniques
   Tasting and blending wood teas with commercial beer
   Evaluating and inspecting a barrel from a local brewery (thanks FOAM and Rare Barrel)
   Hands-on leak repair tools and techniques
   Installing a stainless steel sample nail
   Removing and reseating the barrel's head
   Tasting a batch split between barrel – liquor – wood

Speaking of which, I thought I'd post a mini-tasting of that split batch for those of you who can't make it to the Boot Camps. This batch is a somewhat extra-hefty 15 gallon batch of English brown: infused with malt whiskey from Balcones Distilling, aged in a 5 gallon Balcones malt whiskey barrel, and aged on a medium toast American oak honeycomb from Black Swan Cooperage!

Big Brown Barrel-Off

Appearance, all three look nearly identical. Deep dark brown with a three finger tan head. Beautiful lacing, although it appears too quickly as the head drops in just five minutes.

Balcones Malt Whiskey Barrel (pH 4.38)

Integrated slightly spicy oak and spirit. Brighter than the liquor, less dark fruit and sugar. Notes of toast and light roast coffee come through from the malt much better. Fresh plums. Drier than the liquor infused thanks to the oak tannins. A more balanced beer that I could consider drinking more than 6 ounces of in a sitting. Likely could have sat in the barrel longer if I knew I was going to sit on it for a year.

Balcones Malt Whiskey Infused (pH 4.32)

When this beer was young it was really raw and boozy. Both classes had sizable contingents that guessed this was from the whiskey barrel. It is still potent with a mild ethanol warming, but it has rounded out with dark sugar and caramelized plum joining the rich malt. Still a little dry, but age has really brought the flavors together. Nice vanilla as it warms, almost bourbon-soaked chocolate brownies.

Black Swan Honeycomb Oak Aged (pH 4.42)

Had and continues to have an off-putting phenolic character that reminds me of cheap wood. On the edge of plastic. The flavor is bland and the oak again dominates. I’ve had some wonderful results from oak aging beer with cubes, staves, and spheres… I’m not adding honeycomb to that list. It didn’t appear to be well toasted (in fact none of the sample from their mixed pack appeared well toasted).

An interesting comparison to see what stays the same and what is different. I've had good luck with barrel-alternatives, but I've gone back to cubes after the results from the honeycomb.

Recipe

Batch Size: 15.00 gal
SRM: 22.1
IBU: 38.3
OG: 1.065
FG: 1.010
ABV: 7.2%
Final pH: Above
Brewhouse Efficiency: 75%
Boil Time: 65 min

Fermentables
-----------------
65.2% - 23 lbs Rahr 2-Row Brewer's Malt
22.7% - 8 lbs Weyermann Floor Malted Bohemian Dark
3.5% - 1.25 lbs - Briess Flaked Soft Red Wheat
2.8% - 1 lbs Simpsons Dark Crystal
2.1% - .75 lbs Weyermann Caramunich II
2.1% - .75 lbs Weyermann Chocolate Wheat
1.4% - .50 lbs Dingemans Mroost 1400 MD (De-Bittered Black)

Mash
-------
Mash In - 30 min @ 156F

Hops
-------
2.75 oz Columbus (Pellets, 13.00% AA) @ 60 min

Water
-------
14 g Calcium Chloride

Calcium	Chloride	Sulfate	Sodium	Magnesium	Carbonate
110	140	50	15	10	90

Other
------
1 Whirlfloc Tablet @ 5 mins
1 tsp Yeast Nutrient @ 5 mins

Yeast
-------
WLP023 White Labs Burton Ale

Notes
-------
Yeast harvested from 2 gallon batch Audrey brewed three weeks prior.

9/10/16 Brewed

All filtered DC tap water with 14 g of CaCl. Minimal sparge with about 4 gallons of cold water.

Chilled to 80F with ground water, left at 65F for 12 hours to chill the rest of the way before pitching.

9/27/16 Kegged 4 gallons plain with 4 oz of Balcones Malt Whiskey, 4 gallons with one medium toast Black Swan White Oak Honeycomb (brief boil, decanted), and into a fresh Balcones Malt Whisky barrel (stopper had come off during shipping - smelled great still).

10/21/16 Kegged the barrel-aged version, nice strong spirit character.

I get a commission if you buy something after clicking the links to MoreBeer/Amazon/Adventures in Homebrewing!

Commonwealth Penthesilia: Cherry-Date Sour Brown

I’m all for avant-garde brewing. Pushing boundaries. Trying something unique or weird that doesn't make complete sense to see if it works. That isn’t where you start for you start a commercial sour beer program though! When I collaborated with Commonwealth Brewing Co. a few weeks after they opened fall 2016, we opted to brew a sour-brown/oud-bruin (original post). When it came time for fruit, Greg and Jeramy added hundreds of pounds of cherries and dates to the tart red-wine-barrel-aged base to create Penthesilia. A combination so obvious that I can’t believe no one else has brewed one before (that I'm aware of)! Assertive cherries are perfect in brown-to-black sour beers, playing off the malt rather than dominating (as they often do in pale sours). Dates are like a character-booster for dark candi syrup and 80L+ crystal malts (I’ve enjoyed dates in dark beers for years, Funky Dark Saison #2 and #8).

If you’re within drinking-distance of Virginia Beach, a trip to Commonwealth is well worth it for bottles of this beauty and its sister Hippolyta (the same base with jammy blackberries and Fig-Newton-y figs). If you are reading this post long after it is published, it’d still be worth a stop for Fernweh (white-wine-barrel tart pale they are releasing 11/3) or one of their delicious hoppy beers!

Commonwealth Penthesilia

Smell – Dark cherries lead, thankfully nowhere near cough syrup! Behind that is loads of dark fruit and caramel. Hints of vanilla and almond. Distant Brett earthiness. Faint ethanol as it warms.

Appearance – Opaque brown. The off-white head fades pretty quickly leaving nothing behind. As a side note, this gold-accented beauty of a chalice from the brewery is the second flashiest in my collection.

Taste – Rich, dense, and fruity. Like the aroma, the cherry is the most prominent character. Bright and fresh. Then there is a flash of lactic acid. Finally, a big, long, lingering finish of caramelized-dates, nuttiness, and finally toasted oak. Mildly sweet (more than most American sours), which works well with the fruit and malt. Slight warming alcohol.

Mouthfeel – Enough heft to support all of the malt and fruit. Carbonation is above what I prefer, but then I tend to like lower than most. That said, there is enough body that it doesn’t read thin or spritzy.

Drinkability & Notes – I wanted to wait for cooler weather to post my notes on this flavor-packed fruit and malt bomb. The fermentation takes a back seat, but what shows through is good, no acetic, no discordant funk, sour enough without being sharp.

Changes for Next Time – A portion aged in bourbon (or another spirit) barrel might be a nice kick given the firm fruit character, but it is wonderful as is! I think one of the most interesting areas for brewing experimentation is blending of several characters, rather than a sledgehammer of a single flavor. I really appreciate a two-fruit beer with malt, barrel, and microbe characters all melding together to create (obvious) harmony!

BYO Boot Camp: Burlington and Santa Rosa!

Ever wanted to drink the beers I've posted about? Spend a day talking oak and disassembling a barrel with me? Learn to blend sours? Taste the difference between the same beer barrel-aged, aged on oak cubes, and infused with spirits?

You're in luck!

In a little less than two months, I’ll be flying to Burlington, VT for the Brew Your Own Boot Camps on November 4th and 5th (sign up)! The second round is already scheduled for Santa Rosa, CA February 24th and 25th (sign up). They really couldn’t have picked two better cities as far as I’m concerned (I’m excited to make it to Foam Brewers, Burlington Beer, HenHouse, and Russian River not to mention places like The Alchemist, Hill Farmstead, Fieldwork, Rare Barrel, and Cellarmaker that are close enough with a rental car).

This is an entirely new and unique concept for homebrewing, and I'm honored to be a part of it! You pick a session for each day that runs from 10:00 A.M. to 4:30 P.M with a break for lunch. I can’t speak for what Chris White, Sean Lawson, Gordon Strong, Sean Paxton, Vinnie Cilurzo, Ashton Lewis et al. have planned, but my sessions will have a little of me talking, but mostly hands-on activities that can’t be experienced through a blog, book, podcast, or presentation!

The official descriptions for mine are below, but I wrote them six months ago and they don’t fully capture what I’m planning now. My slides and handouts are due this week, so I’ve included a better idea of the stuff we’ll be doing... I just need to figure out how to get all of the beer and equipment there!

-------------------

For Sour Beer Techniques (almost sold out in Burlington), you'll be participating in two blending sessions the first using three of my pale homebrewed sours and the second commercial sours with a variety of “other” ingredients. I'll guide you through selecting and refining a souring process suited to you. We’ll be capturing wild microbes, and you’ll get a sample of my house saison culture to take home!

Sour Beer Techniques
Learn hands-on traditional European as well as newer American methods to produce sour and funky homebrews from Michael Tonsmeire, Brew Your Own’s “Advanced Brewing” columnist who also literally wrote the book on the subject with American Sour Beers. Michael will demonstrate the unique skill set needed to create your own delicious sour beers including wort production (extract and all-grain), growing alternative microbes, blending, aging on fruit, and sanitation. Our focus will be on practical topics difficult to convey by words alone, no biology or chemistry degree required! You will leave with a clear understanding of the processes to reliably produce sour beers suited to your palate and desired time frame. So get ready to roll up your sleeves and dive into the world of funk and bugs!

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For the Barrels and Wood-Aging session we’ll be evaluating and performing maintenance on barrels: installing “Vinnie” nails, removing and replacing the head, fixing leaks etc. I’ll be serving homebrews aged with different woods/barrels, and we’ll be tasting teas made from a variety of woods (then blending them into commercial beers).

Barrels and Wood-Aging
Learn how to choose, use, and maintain oak barrels – and barrel-alternatives - for homebrewing. Barrels are a significant investment in money, time and beer so understanding how to properly select and use them is essential. Learn hands-on from Brew Your Own’s “Advanced Brewing” columnist and American Sour Beers author Michael Tonsmeire. Michael will also cover options for barrel-alternatives and how best to use the broad variety of available products such as chips, staves, and spirals including both oak and non-oak alternatives. In this comprehensive boot camp, we will also cover special brewing and recipe considerations for making beers to complement the flavors of woods, spirits, and wines and take your wood-aged beers to a new level.

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Even if you don't attend one of my session, please find me and say hello at the craft beer reception or if you see me at one of the breweries around town! I'm planning to get into town a couple days early for both to ensure I have time to drink in the scenery!

Solera Pull No. 2 - Straight and on Flowers

One of the great skills of the lambic brewers and gueuze blenders is identifying which barrels are best blended, fruited, dry hopped, saved, or served straight. It isn’t that the “best” beer is used for one application and the second best for another, they’ve learned what flavor work best for each application (or specific fruit). Instead of deciding on brew day what ingredients you’ll add to a batch of sour beer, try drinking a sample and imaging what flavors might enhance its positives and conceal its flaws (if either is required).

Here is a tasting of two versions of the second pull from the wine barrel solera in my basement!

Solera Pull #2

Appearance – Slightly cloudy, appears to be yeast particulate (clearly I didn’t stop the pour early enough). Vibrant golden-yellow body. The white head is unremarkable, sinking to a thin ring after a few minutes of inspection.

Smell – Despite an additional pitch of Wyeast B. bruxellensis this wine barrel has consistently produced beers been less funky than most of my batches. It shares many similarities with Petrus Aged Pale rather than a lambic or gueuze. The vinous barrel shows through nicely, really the star of the aroma.

Taste – The flavor starts and ends with bright acidity. Very lactic, and firm while sidestepping harshness. There is a rounded malt flavor that compliments and even balances the acidity successfully. Fruity, faint Granny Smith? There just isn’t as much character here as I’d expect from the second pull from a solera fermented with ECY Bugfarm, I need some funky, earthy, citrusy something!

Mouthfeel – It has a medium-light body with moderate carbonation. Not light and spritzy enough for a lambic, which further enhances the Flemish-pale vibe.

Drinkability & Notes – A solid beer, but I think this one excels as a base for other flavors (with fruity dry hops for example it was transformed into one of my favorite beers). It doesn’t have the complexity that a sour needs to stand on its own. It’s probably passed time for another pull, or a decision that the solera has run its course.

While brewing the classics is always fun, I think most homebrewers enjoy venturing off the well-trod path occasionally. When Nathan (now a "savant" according to the WaPost) and I started our two soleras a few years ago we decided to use it to experiment with some of the more interesting concepts we could come up with: roasted butternut squash, cinnamon, and nutmeg; infused with elderflowers; aged on Cabernet Sauvignon wine grapes etc.

This is the same beer as above, but this five gallon portion was aged on one ounce each of dried chrysanthemums and jasmine flowers. We racked out of the barrel in May, 2013 into a carboy with the flowers and bottled a few weeks later.

Flora Solera

Appearance – A bit more careful on the pour on this one and it has a stunningly clear golden body (thank you protein-munching bacteria). Head retention is actually pretty good for a sour beer, better than the plain portion.

Smell – While it might look like a lager, it certainly doesn’t smell like it. The mums lead with their weird-floral-herbaceous character. I don’t pick out the jasmine distinctly, but I suspect it is keeping the beer more towards the floral than the herbal. Relatively straight ahead sour beer behind that, it projects a touch of acetic/vinegar.

Taste – Big acidity leads. No vinegar, but loads of lactic. The result is a firm acidity, but none of the sharpness I get in the finish from vinegary beers. The jasmine adds a juiciness to the mid-palate, while the mums contribute an interesting almost toasty finish. The flowers combined to add some interest to the relatively bland base.

Mouthfeel – Medium-light body, works well with the slightly elevated alcohol. Firm carbonation, but nothing disruptive.

Drinkability & Notes – Intriguing, but not likely an experiment I’d repeat. The jasmine and mums don’t blend harmoniously with the base beer, they stick out too much. So many interesting flowers available, this likely won’t be the last time Nathan and I brew something “weird” like this!

Double - Weizen Trippelbock Tasting

Usually I don’t have the opportunity to drink successive batches of a recipe side-by-side because by the time I rebrew, the previous batch is long gone. Not this time! I saved the last bottle of bourbon-soaked-oak aged Wheat Triplebock to drink along side the updated version (Weizen Trippelbock) that I aged in a first-use five-gallon Balcones Texas Single Malt Whisky barrel. Nearly four years passed in between brewing the first and second batches, so not exactly a perfect comparison for purposes of recipe tweaking.

The recipes were nearly identical, with the only substantial change being a minor reduction and substitution in the amount of Simpsons ~158L Extra Dark Crystal malt (6.35% to 3.9% plus 1% Simpsons Dark Crystal malt). Otherwise I was already pretty happy with the original recipe, which was inspired by Steve Berthel’s Bourbon Cask Aged Wheat Trippelbock from The Livery. Berthel has since left The Livery, which means I will probably never get to try the original (although we can all hope New Holland brews something similar with him on board).

In addition to being fun to taste similar batches brewed four years apart, these two also highlight the difference between aging on oak cubes and in a barrel. Honestly there isn’t some huge flavor advantage to the barrel-aged over the cubes. The biggest mistake many homebrewers make when using either small barrels or barrel “alternatives” is time. If a brewery barrel-ages their beer for six-months or a year, you aren’t going to extract the same compounds by aging your homebrew for only a few weeks with a higher oak-to-beer ratio. Cubes are cheaper and easier, but in some ways they actually better replicate a large barrel. With a small barrel it is easy to overdo the barrel/spirit character, with cubes you can reduce the amount and extend the aging.

This tasting also brings up one of my favorite topics, high alcohol beers! One of the back-handed compliments I can give to a strong beer is that it “hides its strength.” I realize phrases like this are used as actual compliments by many beer drinkers, so let me explain. If a 10% ABV beer tastes like it could be 6% ABV, then I’d rather drink a full pint of 6% beer than a 10 oz. tulip of the strong beer. When a beer is loaded with alcohol I want it to taste like it, not with hot fusel alcohols, but huge flavors, intense maltiness, viscous body, and depth of character that forces me to slow down and pay attention. Brewing a 15% ABV double-extra-imperial stout that tastes like it's 10% is certainly a feat of technical brewing prowess, but so is brewing Bud Lite...

Wheat Triplebock (Older)

Appearance – Dark tan head, only a few centimeters thick, but tight bubbles. The beer is dark brown, nearly black. Looks like a porter.

Smell – Loads of raisin, plum, vanilla, well-aged liquor. Bready maltiness to the extreme. The first signs of floral-perfume alcohol from age, but no other signs of oxidation. Varied aroma that keeps me coming back.

Taste – Big flavors. Lots of dried fruit, charred oak, caramel, and toasted malt. Finishes sweet, but not sugary. The light tannins always helped balance this portion compared to the version without oak. The alcohol is subdued, but it is mildly warming. There is a background hint of soy sauce as it warms, starting to show its age.

Mouthfeel – Almost syrupy, stick-to-your ribs, thick body. Carbonation is perfect, subtle, but present.

Drinkability & Notes – This one aged into a champ, and that's a feat considering it took a silver medal at a local competition in its first year (as an eisbock). Packed with flavor. While it is great now, I think it might be a year or so passed its peak, on the gradual down-slope. It isn't falling apart by any means, but the positive effects of oxidation are beginning to be overshadowed by the negatives.



Weizen Trippelbock (Younger)

Appearance – The head and beer itself of this batch are a few shades lighter thanks to the lower amount of Extra Dark Crystal. Looks more the part of a traditional bock-relative. The head is coarser, not nearly as attractive. This beer doesn’t have a lot of carbonation, but produces a thin cascade of bubbles after a hard pour.

Smell – No surprise, much fresher, cleaner maltiness without as much dark/dried fruit. There is a subtle dried-plum aroma, but it is behind a mellow-caramel (doesn't smell like burnt sugar). The spirit/vanilla aromatics are mellower as well surprisingly, while the clean ethanol is more present.

Taste – The flavor leans more caramel, less dried fruit, similar to the nose. Despite being more than a year old, it tastes brew-day-fresh in comparison to the more than five-year-old beer. Malty and sweet, but mellower than the previous. The alcohol is a bit more apparent, warming, but not hot. It is over 11% ABV.

Mouthfeel – Full, but just slightly less-so. The carbonation is low, but not non-existent. Any lower and it would actively detract, but I'd say it could still benefit from just a touch more.

Drinkability & Notes – It’s a solid beer, but lacks the depth and assertiveness I demand in a beer with this much alcohol. Hopefully another couple years of aging will give it more depth, but for a third batch I'd go back closer to the original recipe, say 5.0-5.5% Extra Dark Crystal.

Rum-Raspberry Sour Brown Tasting

I have a complicated relationship with fruited sour beers. When I’m buying I shy away from them because the fruit tends to conceal the interesting flavors from the fermentation and barrel. Some of them are so delicious though, that I can’t help myself. When I drank Jester King’s Atrial Rubicite earlier this year it was one of those “wow” beers for me, saturated with concentrated raspberries (from hundreds of pounds of fruit in each barrel), without being sticky sweet like New Glarus Raspberry Tart.

For my take on the concept, I soured a brown base for four months in a third-use five-gallon rum barrel. When it had extracted sufficient character from the toasted oak, I racked four gallons onto 14 lbs of frozen/defrosted raspberries (purchased for $50 at Trader Joe’s on the way home from proposing to Audrey… I’m romantic). Considering a gallon of beer weighs a little over 8 lbs, adding 3.5 lbs of raspberries to it is pretty significant.

Recently someone asked me where I get the ideas for my recipes. In this case, in addition to the Jester King beer, I’d read that a compound (ethyl formate) found in both rum and raspberries is what the center of the milky way smells like, talk about brewing a clone!

Intergalactic Raspberry Sour Brown

Appearance – Light pink/tan foam floating on a ruby-brown body. Mild haze when held to the light, but pretty clear. Not actually that much redder than some of my Flemish reds. The head dissipates fairly quickly.

Smell – No getting around that this beer is all about the fruit. The aroma is saturated with jammy raspberries. It is good, but a bit seedier than I intended, thanks to five months spent on the fruit (I would have preferred only three, but I was in San Diego at the time... the sacrifices I made!). As it warms the vanilla from the barrel peeks out, but otherwise there isn’t much else going on.

Taste – Tart, but not forcefully sour. The fruit carries through nicely, unlike many raspberry beers that impress in the nose and fall flat on the tongue. There is a hint of toastiness, I suspect from the oak. Fresh and lively. Not much Brett presence yet, shares many similarities with the rounded lactic acidity from our bourbon barrel (no coincidence considering it got dregs from the Sour Brown from it).

Mouthfeel – Medium-full for a sour beer (not chewy, but enough body to support the fruit and malt). The medium-low carbonation is all I need in a dark/sour beer.

Drinkability & Notes – Despite the intense fruit flavor, it is easy to drink. The added lactic acid from fermentation really helps the fruit to pop. It would be a perfect beer to pair with a rich dessert, loads of flavor and enough acidity to cut through without providing a double-dose of sweetness. Mine is not quite as vibrantly colored as Atrial Rubicite, but nearly the level of raspberry aroma and flavor. It’ll be interesting to see how the gallon I reserved without fruit tastes.

Bourbon Barrel Cherry Brown Tasting

The sour brown I'm drinking now was the third and final beer aged in our bourbon barrel, which will be onto its new life aging Nathan’s beers at Right Proper, when they open later this fall! The barrel started life aging a wee heavy, but after heading sour we rolled with it, adding bottle dregs from sour beers. The base for this cherry-spiked version was a slightly lower-gravity recreation of that initial wee heavy.

I’ve always wanted to know what microbe(s) are in that bourbon barrel. It does such nice things to stronger-darker beers. Luckily Nick of The Yeast Bay agreed to take a look at the dregs (along with trying to isolate the Brett from De Dolle Oerbier Special Reserva for me). If he can get something, it should be a good microbe for the second use spirit barrels at Modern Times after the Imperial Porter et al. have drunk their fill.

Sour Cherry Bourbon Brown

Appearance – Great head retention, especially for a sour beer. It leaves dense, creamy, off-white lacing behind. A quick glance returns an impression of a russet beer. Holding it up to the light reveals the beers true color, beautiful crimson.

Smell – The first whiff I get is toasted malt and subtle oak, but those are followed by a vibrant fresh sour cherry. The fruit is balanced by a subtle earthiness, but this is not a beer that showcases Brettanomyces’ character. The flavors extracted from the bourbon barrel are much subtler than they were on the previous two batches, but hints of vanilla emerge occasionally.

Taste – Firmly sour, but like the other beers from this barrel, the flavor is not overly dry. This balance works well with the rich bready maltiness. The cherry flavor comes on in the mid-palate and continues into the finish. Juicy. The wood character melds with the fruit, but takes a backseat. Not a beer resplendent with complexities, but the flavors that are there are complementary and potent. Still tastes very fresh, despite having been brewed two months short of three years ago.

Mouthfeel – Full, but not sticky or cloying like some high gravity Flemish reds/browns. Medium-low carbonation suits this beer well, much higher and it could take a turn towards the harsh.

Drinkability & Notes – As with the non-fruited version, I’m really happy with the way this one turned out. I’ll be sad to see our little barrel crew disband in the next few months, but I’ll have beers (and friends) to remember it by for a long time!

Sour Times at Modern Times: The Plan

Thursday will be my last day at my "real" job until September. After nearly seven years working for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, I decided to treat myself with a summer “living the dream.” Friday I'll be flying to San Diego, where for the next two months I’ll be brewing at Modern Times! Luckily my boss and wife are supportive. While I’m sure I’ll get to pull some levers and learn the basics on the 30 bbl production brew house, most of my summer with be devoted to brewing pilot batches on the 20 gallon system, and getting the sour/barrel program up and running.

Despite the temperate local climate, I pushed hard and got Jacob to install a dedicated temperature controlled space for the aging sour beers. This has two benefits: first a stable temperature in the mid-low 60s F lowers the risk of Acetobacter producing offensively vinegary beer in any of the barrels; second it helps to physically (and mentally) separate the souring microbes from the rest of the brewery. If we have blow-off from primary fermentation in barrels, or pull samples, they’ll be less of a risk of those microbes finding their way into the beers that pay the bills. The room has space for about 120 ~60 gallon oak barrels (on racks stacked five high), hopefully by the time I leave in August we’ll be around 50% capacity.

It seems like just about every new craft brewery is opening with plans for a souring program, so what will make Modern Times’ sours different? How can we hope to catch up to the quality of American breweries that have a decade (or longer) head start on us?

Microbes: We’ll start a very organic sensory-driven microbe selection process. During my first month I’ll be getting a lot of carboys and growlers filled with moderate gravity/IBU wort. Each fermentor will be inoculated with microbes obtained from a unique source: yeast labs, hobby-microbiologists, bottle dregs, spontaneous inoculations etc. That way, when the local wineries start having freshly dumped barrels available in August we’ll be ready to inoculate with a wide range of cultures. As this first generation of beers ferment and age, we’ll evaluate, propagating the best barrels forward. I want to encourage barrel-to-barrel variation, and develop a variety of cultures ideally suited for different beers.

Base Beers: We plan on brewing four 30 bbl batches of wort for sour beers this summer alone. Each will be a different recipe. Eventually some barrels will be aged on fruit, dry hops, spices, blended, while others are left plain. This will be driven by the flavors produced by the microbes in each barrel. The plan for those four initial batches is: Belgian single, lambic-ish, malty and red, and a wild card brown or bière de garde most likely.

Fruit: Being in southern California we’ll have access to a huge variety of amazing produce pretty much year round. You’ll be seeing lots of sour beers that take advantage of this. We’ll be small enough that farmers markets and eventually direct farm-to-brewer relationships for interesting varieties will be possible. As much as I enjoy sour beers made with sour cherries or raspberries (I’m sure we’ll do some) I’m more excited to add as many different fruits as I can. As with the other aspects, sensory will be the key, I don’t want to match fruits to beers before I taste either.

Me: Hopefully the skills I’ve developed brewing sour beers at home over the last seven years (and researching a book the last two plus) will give us a jump start on every aspect of the process. The other brewers (Matt, Alex, and Derek) are no slouches either, and as a team effort I have a huge amount of confidence in the sour beers we’ll be able to produce. I won't guarantee those first batches will be perfect, but I'll do my best to get them as close as I can.

All of this doesn’t even touch on the other side of the Modern Times funky/sour program, stainless steel fermented Brett beers. The guys already have a batch of Neverwhere, my 100% Brett IPA recipe, on dry hops (Citra, Centennial, and Chinook). While most of the batch will be served on tap, we are planning to bottle a limited amount. My original batch held up surprisingly well when I bottled some of it from a party tap with a bottling wand jammed into it, but if you are lucky enough to get one it certainly won’t be a beer to sit on for long! The yeast harvested from Neverwhere will be pitched into be a slightly darker, lower gravity, and maltier beer, that is no less hoppy (heavy on the Motueka). Then we may try a pre-souring followed by 100% Brett beer after that to get something sour released before the first of the barrel-aged beers are ready in a year or so.

I’ll continue to update this blog all summer, but the format and timing of those posts probably won’t be what you’ve come to expect. If there are any aspects of the process you’d like to hear more about, please let me know. If you find yourself in San Diego, swing by the brewery and say hello!