Have you had an unintentionally "infected" beer?

Yes, and have never brewed an intentionally sour beer	16 (21%)
Yes, and have brewed an intentionally sour beer	20 (27%)
No, and have never brewed an intentionally sour beer	28 (37%)
No, and have brewed an intentionally sour beer	9 (12%)
Never brewed beer	1 (1%)

I haven't done studied statistics in a couple years, but that looks like a no questions asked positive correlation to me. Out of the people who have brewed a sour beer 69% have had an infection, while it has only happened to 36% of people who have not brewed a sour beer.

Granted this is probably a correlation that is partly based on the fact that people who have brewed sour beers probably have been brewing longer and thus have had more chances for infections... but I doubt that is enough to explain nearly twice the percentage of people reporting an infection.

Just let this being a warning that you do have to take some extra precautions if you want to bring, Brettanomyces, Lactobacillus, or Pediococcus into contact with your equipment. It also shows why so many pro-brewers don't brew sour beers, even if they (secretly) want to.

I have had one unintentional funky beer, but since then I have tightened up my process and have been running a clean ship. The only item I have segregated is my post-boil tubing, everything else gets used for both funky and clean beers (I just don't have the room to do otherwise in a small apartment). In my general cleaning/sanitation routine I use an extended generic OxiClean and hot water soak to get the "gunk" off a used piece of equipment, then I soak it in Star San before storing it. I then re-sanitize before the next use, this way everything gets sanitized twice in between every use, even if the previous beer was clean. If you keep two sets of all your post-boil equipment you might not need to be this diligent, but it wouldn't hurt as even a significant number of "clean" brewers have had unwelcome guests in their beer.

If anyone wants to add a comment with their preferred cleaning routine feel free, and make sure to include how effective it has been.

Berliner Weiss

I've got another sour beer going, a Berliner Weiss. Wyeast has a limited edition Berliner Weiss blend out from January until March 2008. After the great results I got from the Roeselare Blend (FYI its supposed to be re-released this April) in my Flanders Red I decided to give this one a try. 3191 Berliner Weiss is a mix of lactobacillus, Saccharomyces, and a "special" Brett strain as well. The Brett is rumored to come from a Berliner Weiss brewery that has recently gone bankrupt, not sure what brewery or how the Brett strain compares to the other commercially available strains, but how could I resist?

The hops and alcohol are kept low to keep the sensitive lacto happy and putting out acid, unlike Pediococcus lacto will not do an effective job souring a beer after primary fermentation. Even in optimal conditions, lacto will be inhibited by its own acids at only 50% the level that pedio can live in (meaning that lacto on its own will never make a beer as sour as a Lambic).

The kink in my recipe was to add the hops to the mash and preform a decoction to get from the protein rest to the saccharification rest. At least that was the plan, but my decoction didn't raise the temperature enough so I had to resort to adding more hot water. After the sparge I heated the wort until it just barely came to a boil, then chilled it and pitched the blend. Without a boil remember that your efficiency will take a tumble because you can't collect extra wort to concentrate down in the boil.

The number of IBUs mash hops are purported give a beer varies widely between the different hop utilization formulas, but I doubt any accurately account for mash hops that go through a decoction, but no wort boil. It is safe to say that this beer is low in bitterness, 4 or 5 IBUs wouldn't surprise me.

So far I am underwhelmed by the sourness of the beer which should be bright and firmly acidic. I have my doubts about the blend, many people suggest adding the lacto a day or so before the Saccharomyces because the lacto likes simple sugars (which Saccharomyces also likes to eat first) and low alcohol, but this blend is so easy (and cheap compared to buying multiple strains) that it was hard to resit.

The picture to the right is a time lapse, one photo taken every 12 hours for the first 7 days of fermentation (starting 12 hours after I pitched). Nothing particularly exciting, but you can see the krasusen grow, stay in high krausen, then begin to fall.

It will be a few months before this beer is finished, but i thought I would put my recipe and notes up since the yeast/bacteria blend is only available for another 6 weeks or so.

No -Boil Berliner Weiss

Recipe Specifics
----------------
Batch Size (Gal): 3.50
Total Grain (Lbs): 5.00
Anticipated OG: 1.032
Anticipated SRM: 2.4
Anticipated IBU: 0.5 (No idea how accurate this is)
Brewhouse Efficiency: 59 %
Wort Boil Time: 1 Minutes

Grain
------
3.50 lbs. Pilsener
1.50 lbs. Wheat Malt

Hops
-----
0.50 oz. Willamette

Yeast
-----
WYeast 3191 Berliner-Weisse

Water Profile
-------------
Profile: Pale, Low Hop

Calcium(Ca): 65.0 ppm
Magnesium(Mg): 7.5 ppm
Sodium(Na): 15.0 ppm
Sulfate(SO4): 50.0 ppm
Chloride(Cl): 96.0 ppm
biCarbonate(HCO3): 23.0 ppm

pH: 8.25

Mash Schedule
-------------
10 min @ 123 Infuse
10 min @ 136 Decoc (Thick 2 qrts)
45 min @ 146 Infuse
20 min @ 154 Infuse

Notes
-----
Brewed 1/19/08 with James

Water was 50/50 DC Tap and Distilled water

Added hops to the mash right after dough in. Both malts were from Weyermann.

Pulled a thick decoction 5 minutes after the protein rest started. Brought up to a boil in 10 minutes, then held there for about 12 more.

Batch sparged to collect about 3.5 gallons. Brought to a boil, skimmed, then immediately chilled down to 70. Shook to aerate then pitched a pack of the Berliner Weisse blend, and left it at 70ish

Decent Krausen by 12 hours.

1/27/08 Krausen mostly down, the gravity is down to 1.005. Not much sourness.

1/29/08 Transfered to 3 gallon glass secondary, got just about 3 gallons.

2/11/08 Pulled a sample, gravity still reads 1.005. Still light on the lactic, but increased from last time. Some odd fruitiness as well, hopefully this one will improve with some age.

3/12/08 Finally getting more sourness, another few months and it should be ready to go.

4/16/08 Seems to be getting more sour, pH paper reads below 4.0 (which really isn't that low for a sour beer).

4/19/08 Bottled with 3.5 oz of table sugar. Aiming for around 3.2 volumes of CO2, I'd go higher but I'm concerned about the bottles handling it. The airlock went dry at some point recently, it had water a week previously.

4/25/08 Already pretty good carbonation.

5/10/08 Awarded first in its category at the 2008 Spirit of Free Beer.

5/12/08 Tasted as part of the Alternative Hopping Basic Brewing Radio Episode.

5/27/08 First Tasting, plain, with commercial raspberry, woodruff, and homemade blueberry syrup

8/24/08 Second Tasting, just plain.

7/8/09 Second Berliner Weiss Brew

Mo' Betta Bretta Clone #2 - Tasting

I could have sworn I had done a tasting of my second attempt at Mo Betta Bretta, but it appears I haven't. It was on the Offbeat Yeast Basic Brewing Radio Podcast (a new episode is in the works).

This beer has been bottled for 7 months, but it seems to still be developing nicely.

Appearance – Voluminous meringue-like head. The beer has visible carbonation coursing through its burnt orange hazy body. Great lacing and retention, the Carafoam really did its job on this one.

Smell – Strong apple, not green apple like actylaldehyde, more like apple cider. A bit of straight up funk as it warms. It also has a bit of tropical aroma, I have heard the original Mo Betta Bretta described as having a pineapple aroma, but I would say this is more generically fruity.

Taste – Light tartness (thanks to the acid malt), with a bready malt backbone. There is some cherry funk as well, but it is very smooth. No bitterness, and rather dry, so it has good balance. Not particularly complex, and with a hint of clean ethanol in the finish. An example of how clean a 100% Brett beer can be when the fermentation temperature is kept down

Mouthfeel – Prickly carbonation, with a medium-thin body. I like the stronger carbonation on this one, more than the first version.

Drinkability & Notes – Solid drinkability, much less objectionable funk than my first attempt when it was this young. I think the carbonation has increased a bit, but it still very appropriate for a Belgian-y beer.

State of the Blog

On the first Anniversary of the Mad Fermentationist I'd like to thank everyone who has read the Blog, posted comments, and emailed me, and especially to the people who I have met because of the blog.

I thought some of you might be interested in some stats from my first year of Blogging. I didn't start using Google Analytics until the start of March, so these stats are for the last 11 months.

Total Visits: 11,712 (32/day)
Pretty good, for my first year. However, this number has been more rapidly growing, this January I already have more than 2,000 visits.

Page Views: 22,435
Unique Visitors: 6,110

Direct Traffic: 2,908
Search Engines: 3,373
Referring sites: 5,431

Top Reffering Sites:
1st Northern Brewer
2nd Beer Advocate
3rd Basic Brewing Radio

From: 68 Countries
1st USA
2nd Canada
3rd Australia
4th UK
5th New Zealand
6th Sweden
7th Denmark
8th Norway
9th Ireland
10th Netherlands
11th Finland

Interestingly all are either English speaking, or Scandinavian.

About half of the visitors were from America
1st California
2nd DC (A good chunk of those hits are from me)
3rd Pennsylvania
4th Virginia
5th Minnesota
6th New York
7th Illinois
8th Michigan
9th Oregon
10th Massachusetts

Not surprising that a lot of those states have strong and active craft brewing and homebrewing bases. In case you were wondering I got the fewest hits from Hawaii.

Surprisingly I get more hits from Firefox (49%) than Internet Explorer (40%)

Operating System:
79% Windows
17% Mac
5% Linux

(Even had a few odd iPhone, Wii, and PS3 users stop by)

Things on tap for this year:
Cheese
Cured Meat
Berliner Weiss (In Secondary)
Lambic (Brewed 18 months ago, blending/bottling in August)
Flanders Pale Ale (Brewed 6 months ago, bottling in August)
Plenty of other interesting fermentation experiments.

Cottage Cheese - Not really fermenting

Making cheese involves first coagulating milk to remove the whey from the curd then fermenting it. I have already played with fermenting milk without removing the whey when making yogurt. So I decided to try my hand at a quick acid coagulated cheese before stepping into rennet coagulation, and fermented/aged cheese.

The procedure from Good Easts was pretty simple. I took a half gallon of skim milk and added .375 cups of distilled white vinegar. In yogurt the lactic acid bacteria create the acid that slowly coagulates the milk, in this case the acetic acid from the vinegar acts very quickly after a few minutes of stirring followed by 30 minutes of sitting. The curd clumped together in 6 or so large blobs each of which looked like warm mozzarella. This is very different than rennet coagulation which makes a solid coagulated block that needs to be cut before it is drained.

After 30 minutes I strained the curd from the whey through a tea towel laid on top of colander. Once most of the whey was gone, I rinsed the curd in cold running water for 5 minutes mixing it and squeezing it as I went to remove the acid and develop the curd. After that I squeezed the curd dry, broke it up, and tossed it with 1/2 tsp of kosher salt. I then added a few teaspoons of half and half (you could use anything from skim milk to cream) to give the cheese back some moisture.

The resulting cheese was somewhere between cottage cheese and ricotta, the curds were a bit too small and grainy, and it wasn't quite juicy enough for cottage cheese. Not to say that it wasn't a tasty snack, just that it wasn't just like commercial cottage cheese.

It was a worthwhile experiment, but yielding under 1 cup of cottage cheese for 1/2 gallon of milk it probably isn't worth the time or money to make regularly in place of commercial versions. Look for more information on cheese as I go forward, I hope to start with a soft cheese like camembert before moving onto firmer longer aged cheese.

Courage Russian Imperial Stout Clone - First Tasting

The first official tasting of a batch I will hopefully still be drinking in 2017. My Courage Clone was brewed in July and bottled in November. It is still very young, but I thought it was worth trying to give a baseline for future tastings and make sure the Brett hadn't survived the Campden Tablets and gone back to work.

Appearance – Beautiful pitch black in my snifter. When held at an angle to the light the edges are dark brown, beers with roasted barley tend to be more red. The carbonation inflates a one-finger tan head. It tries to hang on for a few minutes, but rather quickly it falls to a light crème which sticks around for the duration

Smell – Some clean ethanol, and dusty cocoa powder. A bit of dark cherries, either from the candi syrup or the Brett, I can't tell. Not much funk, but there is a hint of earthiness as the beer warms. I also get a light coconut aroma. None of the classic stout coffee aroma, those come from roasted barley just like the red hues.

Taste – Good balance, but the alcohol is still a bit forward. It isn't hot or fusel-y, but at 11% abv it simply needs some more time to mellow. Solid bitterness, but nowhere as aggressive as the American interpretation of the style. The strong toastiness which I tasted in my last bottle is mostly mellowed, but there is still a solid malty base. There is a bit of tartness from the Brett, but again not much in the way of funk. As it warms there is just a hint of apple cider as well.

Mouthfeel – The carbonation seems to have gotten slightly stronger, but it is still in good shape. Medium body, a good level, but maybe a bit thin for a beer this big and contemplative. I won't declare that I'm in the clear yet from the Brett restarting, but in another few months if the carbonation still hasn't changed I will be.

Drinkability & Notes – It is certainly still drinking “young,” I think it just needs some time for the alcohol to mellow and some complexity to develop. I am surprised how little funk the Brett A gave to it, and with it hopefully dead it shouldn't develop anymore. This is one of my beers that I am most looking forward to aging, I've stowed 10 bottles at my parents' house to be consumed by me one a year as a Christmas treat when I go to visit them. Not much oak presence now, but it may shine through once the beer calms down.