Big Ol' Bottling Day

My first bottle of Rodenbach Grand Cru was my sour beer awakening, and love at first sip.  When I learned of Wyeast’s Roeselare Blend, designed for just such a beer, I went right for it, and began the process of brewing my first Flanders red.  Actually, my first two: the first packet I found was pretty old, so I ended up picking up a fresher packet for the five-gallon batch and used the first one for a one-gallon extract batch that also got a pound of raspberries.  My dad was nice enough to fashion an oak stave for me to use with main batch in secondary to add barrel character and double as a stopper; using my specifications to avoid problems with the carboy cracking as the stave expanded, it ended up looking more like a Louisville Slugger.

When the batches reached their first birthday, I decided to go ahead and bottle.  The same day, I also bottled my two recent batches of wheat mild.  As if that weren’t enough, I also went forward with a rough brewday that was originally supposed to produce a black saison; more on that soon.

Bottling was pretty easy and straightforward; it was just an awful lot of beer to bottle.  I ended up with right around five cases all told, and between sanitizing bottles, cleaning and sanitizing (and recleaning and resanitizing) racking equipment bottling equipment, capping bottles, and cleaning fermenters, it was a pretty serious time investment.  I was happy to have it all done, though; no more worrying over when it was all going to happen.

The samples of wheat mild were wonderfully, vibrantly bready; I didn’t notice a lot of differences between the batches, but I imagine they’ll stand out more with more in-depth tasting.  The main batch of Flanders red, though, turned out to be a disappointment.  Nearly a year ago, when I moved it to secondary to age and funkify, the few drops I tasted were already quite sour; at bottling, it had an appropriate aroma, but tasted almost like water.  It had very little sourness, tartness, or even discernible flavour at all.  This on a beer that developed a pond scum-like pellicle more than once in its aging.

Fortunately, the raspberry Flanders turned out more to what I’d hoped it would.  This little batch blew off its airlock early into fermentation; after that, I just put a Ziploc bag over it.  It was never transferred to a secondary fermenter, and a very serious, funky scum formed and stoically remained on top of the raspberries for the duration of aging.  Between the reading I’ve done since brewing these and the observed differences in treatment of these beers, I hope the next big batch will turn out a bit more sour and funky as planned.