Please Ferment...

I'll keep the words about my trip short. Europe was, of course, great. I had an excellent if excessive time at Oktoberfest where I drank at least 4 gallons of beer in 4 days. All the other places I went were a blast too; Barcelona and Prague with my friends followed by Madrid, Cambridge, and London with my girlfriend.

I managed to find craft beer in basically every country, which genuinely surprised me  that I found some in Spain. I intended to just enjoy the cheap, delicious wine (Rioja and Tempranillo for life!) but we stumbled across a great craft brewery along the water in Barcelona along the water called BlackLab Brewhouse. They were super nice and ended up giving us a free taster of their new kettle sour with watermelon and jalapeno from whate I remember. Then in Madrid the AirBnB my girlfriend rented turned out to be a door or two down from a newer craft beer bar featuring some more local Spanish breweries. This is in a neighborhood she had lived in for a couple years just a few years ago!

Prague of course has a strong history of the pilsner beer style and I enjoyed those beers, especially dark lagers. In London I took my girlfriend to my favorite brewery I've discovered, Partizan, which makes some great herbed saisons. It's only open Saturdays so plan ahead. We also got our "pub experience" in Cambridge after having a great steak dinner along with an amazing bottle of wine at Chophouse.

Golden/Amber Sour

But on to the brew. Without WiFi and with only a limited selection of books I ended up reading whatever was on my Kindle over and over again. That happened to be American Sour Beers and Brew Like a Monk, and I probably read each twice during all the different flights, trains, and buses I took. I couldn't wait to get back and brew something funky and delicious.

The first thing I decided to do was a golden sour with my Bootleg Biology Solera Blend 2017. Before I left in my last post, I mentioned how I wanted to get ingredients at Black Sands, which is two blocks away from me, but the homebrew shop wasn't open yet. Well this time it was, so I decided to get my supplies from there. 

I didn't do a whole lot of planning for this brew, I actually intended to go in there and get supplies for a dubbel but they didn't quite have exactly the supplies I wanted for it. No worries, I instead quickly whipped up an intended golden sour.

Ingredients

Malt

8lbs Golden Promise

4lbs Pale Wheat

1lb   Flaked Rye

1lb   Vienna

Hops

1oz Hallertau Mittelfruh @ 45

Yeast

Bootleg Biology Sour Solera 2017

Expected OG @ 65% Eff: 1.056

Actual OG: 1.052

Calculated IBUs: 9

The brew went pretty uneventfully. Lindsay helped out for parts of it, mainly by cooking a delicious lunch. The wort turned out a little less golden than it did a nice amber color.

I had also intended to package my saison fermented with another Bootleg Biology blend but ran into a wee bit of trouble. The tubing I bought to use with my bottling bucket and bottling wand was way way way too big, so I scrapped that idea. Instead I decided to keg condition that beer.

The next roadblock I ran into was that I had no white sugar, only brown sugar. But after a quick google, it seemed to be fine. So I boiled 4oz up in a couple cups of water and kegged the beer on top of it. In another week or so I'll hook it up to CO2 and see what it's like! It was tasting really good out of the fermentor.

Other Thing of Note

The other thing of note with this brew was that it took for-freakin-ever to start fermenting. I brewed this on Sunday October 22, and the beer was completely still until Wednesday October 25. I had planned to run to MoreBeer and buy a fresh pitch of White Labs 550 if it didn't show any signs, but lo and behold I woke up to a nicely fermenting beer Thursday morning! 

I guess there was a very long lag time. It makes sense, the whole pack is supposed to be 125 million cells but that's probably divided between sacch, brett, lacto, pedio, and whatever else is in there. Add to that the pack is at least a few months old (kept in the fridge of course), and I probably should have made a starter. Anyways it's all good. I drank a Boon Oude Geuze a l'Ancienne tonight (10/26/2017) after work and poured the dregs in.

My goal is to make this beer into a solera. I'm thinking in 6-12 months when this batch is ready, I'll either bottle 3 gallons straight out of the fermentor or age a gallon of it on some fruit. I'm excited to see how subsequent batches turn out and it's nice to naturally have to make split batches to fill up what I've taken.

Prost!

Timeline

10/22/2017: Brewed
1/06/2018: Tasted a sample when I went to keg a beer. It was tasting really good! It had already gotten pretty sour at this point. It was lemony, not completely dry yet, and I was pleased. It would probably make a good blending component to a saison if I wanted to make it tart, but I think in another month I plan to bottle it straight or one gallon straight/one gallon dry hopped and then replenish with wort made with aged hops to give it more hop character. Also added dregs from a bottle of Celladoor Rustic which was really, really delicious to me.
3/10/2018: Transferred 1 gallon onto mangos. 
1 Gallon onto 1oz Amarillo and 0.5oz BRU-1 hops from Yakima Valley
~1 Gallon combined with ~2 gallons of Dubbel with Brett L and a can of sweet cherry puree
3/29/2018: Bottled the dry hopped portion
4/5/2018: Added 5 gallons of actively fermenting saison onto the ~1.5 gallon of beer and yeast cake left.
4/19/2018: Tried the dry hopped portion for the first time. Really good! Smell is heavy on the citrus, a lot of grapefruit and some lemon. Taste is the same, the tartness comes through with a light lemon rather than an enamel crushing acid. The Amarillo complements that flavor nicely. There's a tinge of THP at the end but I have to look for it to find it.
This is an excellent beer, I'm really enjoying it. I definitely want to scale this batch up, can't believe I only have 7 more bottles of the dry hopped sour left.