American Sour Red

Last summer, I brewed a mixed fermentation blonde beer with a collection of propped-up bottle dregs. This year, I continued that tradition with a red beer.

While the rough outline of the recipe follows the Rare Barrel's base red beer, I used Best Mälz's RedX malt for the base to (hopefully) achieve a truly saturated red color. Flaked oats as well as wheat and rye malts joined the party for added malt complexity and mouthfeel. The barest sliver of Galena brings just over 5 IBUs to the batch.

Prior to boiling, I soured the wort with a lacto starter grown up from malt. I've followed this process with great success in the past, but this time around, it failed to produce any noticeable sourness. It may have been the short contact time: having found this method to make a big impact in previous batches, I only gave the starter 8 hours to work before boiling. At this point, however, my dregs culture has produced plenty of acidity, so no harm, no foul. I started this year's batch with Wyeast's French Saison yeast to consume some of the simpler sugars and produce some spicy esters before the Brett and bugs took hold and continued shaping the beer. At transfer, I didn't get any bold saison characteristics, which was in line with my expectations for this yeast's addition: subtle underlying complexity.

Since my 6-gallon carboy was otherwise occupied by mead, this batch spent its two months of primary fermentation in a plastic bucket. At transfer to secondary, the flavor was developing nicely, but might be more acetic than I'd prefer. It has since developed a nice pellicle and is aging happily. While I really enjoyed fruiting much of last year's blonde, most of the fruit I have on hand right now--farmer's market-procured pluots, peaches, and nectarines, all sliced, frozen, and vacuum packed in the freezer--don't strike me as a great pairing for a red beer. I do have some cherries from a year and a half ago, but they haven't been properly sealed and smell suspiciously like the smoked cheese we bought around the same time. This beer might be a good candidate for oaking.

I've planned a dark beer for next year's iteration. I'll still probably go with that, but may brew another blonde in the meantime to use all of the stone fruit I have hanging around right now. I may also start a new dregs culture; in my zeal to start this project, my existing culture received dregs from a few bottles that I'd prefer not to have in the mix. This spring I had a new culture going from a bottle each of Logsdon Farmhouse Cerasus (October 2014) and Cascade Blackcap Raspberry (2015) that was producing a fantastic strawberry character. I ended up adding it to the mix that went into the red, but I'd like to start over with that blend for future mixed fermentation beers. As far as the project overall, though, I don't regret a moment of it.

American Sour Red

Batch size: 5.25 gallons
Projected OG: 1.063
Projected SRM: 15.3
Projected IBU: 5.2
Boil time: 60 minutes
Brewhouse efficiency: 62%

Grains
67.2% - 10 lb Best Mälz RedX
13.4% - 2 lb Weyermann Wheat
9.2% - 1 lb 6 oz Flaked oats
6.7% - 1 lb Rye malt
3.4% - 8 oz Aromatic

Hops
.1 oz Galena (16.0%) (60 min)

Yeast
250 ml Lacto starter (sour wort 8 hours)
Sour Cultures No. 1 (1/4 cup), 2, 3
WY3711 French Saison - 1 l starter

Extras
1 tsp Yeast nutrient (5 min)

Water (mash)
Profile: Reno (brewersfriend.com)
Target profile: Balanced (brewersfriend.com)
65.2 Ca, 8.5 Mg, 20.9 Na, 76.5 Cl, 86.7 SO4
Alkalinity 34.0, RA -17.5

Lacto starter: 28 May 2016
25 g DME with 250 ml water & pinch of yeast nutrient, with handful of malt
Kept in bucket with hot tap water & aquarium heater set to max (93F).

Brewday: 16 June 2016
Mash: 18 qts @ 156F for 60 minutes
Sparge: 20 qts @ 190F
Pre-boil volume: 7.2 gallons
Pre-boil SG: 13.2P (1.052)

Water additions (mash): 4 g Gypsum, 2 g Epsom salts, 1 g Salt, 4 g CaCl

Pre-acidified with 7 ml Lactic acid (88%), brought to quick boil, chilled to 115F, pitched Lacto starter. Covered in plastic wrap, kept warm for 8 hours; no noticeable souring took place. Boiled as usual.

Transferred 5.9 gallons at 15.8P to fermenter.
Chilled to 72F (warm ground water), put in swamp cooler at 62F to chill. Fermented in swamp cooler at 68F ambient, ramped to ambient (~75F) after 1 day active fermentation.

Secondary: 17 August 2016
SG: 1.012

Bottled: 1 May 2017
FG: 1.010
ABV: 7.0%
Bottled 4 gallons with 3.8 oz table sugar.
Bottling yeast (US-05) acclimated to the beer’s high gravity 24 hours ahead of time by adding finished beer to the priming solution at a ~1:1 ratio with water.
Moved 1 gallon onto 9.7 oz dried blueberries (rinsed in boiled water, sprayed with Star San) & .5 oz boiled oak cubes.

Hopped Mead

While my wife can't drink beer and wasn't into IPAs even when she still did, she quite likes a hopped cider or mead. Before leaving town this summer, I started a batch of mead to scratch that itch.

The ingredients were, as usual for mead, pretty simple: the remainder of the 24-lb bucket of great Utah honey we purchased last year. I used the TOSNA regimen suggested by Sergio Moutela, owner of Melovino Meadery, on Mead Made Right. I wanted principally fruity hops to go with the floral character of the honey, so opted for Centennial and Mosaic.

The batch came together quickly and easily, but I didn't really see the kind of initial activity I thought I remembered from previous batches of mead. Dummy that I am, I just started hitting it with more yeast and oxygen. It took my local homebrew shop owners encouraging me not to just judge it on appearance for me to actually check the gravity. Indeed, it was fermenting just fine, so I started with the nutrients schedule a few days late and with a bunch of extra oxygen and yeast in the batch. Thankfully, it doesn't seem to have had an adverse effect on the final product.

When we returned from our travels in August, the batch had settled into semi-sweet territory, which suited us just fine. Past batches that have fermented out further have struck me as overly thin and slightly medicinal; this one was fuller, rounder, and still retained a good sense of the honey. The dry hops added a juicy tropical fruit and citrus character that melded well with the honey. This is one of my most successful mead batches, despite some early hiccups in process and judgement. I'll be interested to see how the hop character continues to change and fade into the background as this ages.

Hopped Mead

Batch size: 5 gallons
Projected OG: 1.100

Fermentables
13 lb Utah mountain honey

Hops
2 oz Centennial (7.6%) (Dry hop - 3 days)
2 oz Mosaic (11.3%) (Dry hop - 3 days)

Yeast
5 g Lalvin 71B-1122 (rehydrated)

Extras
6.25 g Go-Ferm (yeast rehydration)
25 g Fermaid-O (TOSNA: 6.25 g @ 24, 48, 72 hrs, 7 days after pitching)

Brewed: 31 May 2016
Rehydrate yeast: 125 g boiled water
OG: 24.2P

Boiled water, used some at 160F to liquefy honey. Cooled rest to 68F, filled to 5.5-gallon mark, pitched yeast, put in swamp cooler with 56F water to chill to ferment temp. Swapped out water once & added ice packs to continue chilling.

Fermented in swamp cooler at 62-64F ambient.

3 June 2016: No activity yet. Repeated rehydration with new yeast & Go-Ferm as well as 60 seconds of O2.

7 June 2016: Took a lack of visible activity to mean that the yeast were not working. Took hydrometer reading today: down to 1.085, so some activity is taking place. Initiating TOSNA schedule starting today.

Degassed twice a day for the first week of fermentation.

After the first week, left town for a few days; swamp cooler ambient reached 69F. Upon returning, cooled it back down into 62-64F range and degassed about once a day for the remainder of primary.

14 June 2016: Final Fermaid-O addition.

18 June 2016: Moved out of swamp cooler to sit at ambient (~75F) for the next month and a half. Have continued to degas twice daily up until now.

Secondary: 05 September 2016
FG: 1.012
ABV: 11.7%
Tastes pretty damn good! Residual sugar keeps it from coming across with a lot of cardboard, phenolics, or watery character.
Added 2.5 tsp bentonite dissolved in 1 cups boiled water, held 10 hours.

Dry hopped: 18 September 2016

Bottled: 21 September 2016
Sample had a little more tropical fruit hop flavor, but not a lot of hop aroma.