Style Of The Week 9/5/07 -sour Ales

[manticle]

Interested to hear how the peach goes. I've got a sour white peach ale planned for some time during this year. I thnk Mosher talks about peaches not holding their own in a beer but the mad fermentationist blog disagrees.

Nothing ventured etc.

 

[raven19]

Slightly :icon_offtopic: Manticle, but I did a peach Kolsch a while back and it received favourable reviews from fellow brewers (minus the gushing from poorly cleaned bottles on my part). The peaches I used were from the in laws peach tree, they are yellow fleshed fruit).

 

[kabooby]

Yes it will be interesting to see.

Lindemans do thier Pecheresse which is a nice beer.

Kabooby

 

[raven19]

Some interesting footage from Cantillon Brewery in this vid.
http://vimeo.com/19367846

(found on the brewing network - article here: tbn linky

 

[vykuza]

I'm brewing a sour pale using the Russian River bugs I cultured from a few bottles I dragged home from the states. I've fermented a batch on the bugs and gotten a great flavour profile. I plan on putting it to a 50L keg I have and age it, extracting 1/2 of the keg a year and keeping it rolling, a la a Solera.

So I have a 20L batch ready to go in to the secondary, and what is going to be a big bug yeastcake, ready for the next 20L.

Question is: am I better off pitching on to the whole yeastcake, pitching a smaller slurry (if so, how much?) or just dumping the wort into the secondary/keg along with the first batch?

The first batch has been fermenting on the bugs for 4 weeks, tastes great (but super slimy... mmm pedio). From what I can tell there's definitely a S. Cerevisiae strain in there.

 

[vykuza]

Oh, and to bump/add another question:

Next year, when I take some of the beer and replace it with fresh stuff, am I better off adding a fermented beer, or wort to the keg, and if fermented, am I better off fermenting it with bugs or with a standard yeast, and letting the existing bugs sour it in time?

 

[raven19]

Nick - I have found pitching wort gives better results rather than pitching already fermented beer.

My flanders red is souring nicely from a wort pitch. But my fermented basic beer on Brett Brux is struggling to give much in the way of sour/funk.

I would also repitch a decent amount of slurry - how much I am not quite sure - maybe head over to the babblebelt forum they have some great insight over there!

Edit - the more you repitch the greater effects you can obtain with the funky yeasts.

 

[vykuza]

Thanks Raven. I had a sniff around the babblebelt and by the looks of things they mostly recommend to pitch 1/3 or 1/2 the yeast cake from a 5gal batch in a similar situation. And wort right in next year!