First Pull: Roeselare Pale Solera

Just a quick update post today.  Over the past few months I've been slowly increasing the number of six gallon soleras I have on the go, the idea being to eventually have a range of different beers on hand for coupage and blending.  To keep track of things I've decided to name each pale solera after the bug blend it was fermented with.  I currently have three in my closet---Roeselare, ECY01, ECY20---and I'm thinking of adding a fourth with The Yeast Bay's Mélange blend some time in the next month or so.  At the moment each has a slightly different base recipe, but I might start using the same base for each in future.

Last week I took the first 3 gallon pull from my Roeselare Pale Solera, and topped it up again with some freshly fermented beer.  The original solera was a mix of a Flanders Pale Ale fermented with Roeselare blend on October 11th 2013, to which I added another pale beer fermented with Wyeast 3522 on June 24th 2014.  That made the average age of the beer I pulled about 11 months.  The top-up beer I added last week was a slightly lower gravity version of the original recipe, fermented with Wyeast 1318 instead of a Belgian strain.  It had a gravity of about 1.012 when I added it to the carboy.

The beer I pulled still had a fairly high gravity of around 1.006, and was only moderately sour, with a pH of 3.96.  It had a very nice mix of citrus and stone fruit flavours, with only a little funk in the background.  I added a little over a gallon to a four gallon version of this buckwheat saison (recipe was slightly different because I ran out buckwheat), and I'm planning on letting them ferment together for another month or two before adding dry hops and packaging in bottles.  The base saison already has a nice fruitiness which I think will be complemented by the flavours from the aged beer.  Its also already fairly tart, so I'm glad that the solera beer isn't too sour yet.

I also transferred another 2 gallons into smaller jugs for extended ageing, flushing each with CO2 before transfer to minimise oxygen pick up (since I don't have kegs, I use a handheld CO2 charger).  The plan is to use some for cutting other saisons in the next few months, and to draw on the rest as a component in blended beers when I start pulling from the other soleras later this year.  I'll be brewing a 3 gallon top up for my Flanders Red solera in the next few weeks, and allowing the beer I pull from it to age further in a smaller carboy.  Hopefully I should be able to start creating blends from them all at the start of the Autumn this year.

Brew Day: Bug County Solera

As the number of sour beers fermenting in my closet increases, the way I think about individual batches has started to change slightly.  When I first began brewing sours a few years ago I thought of each batch as a separate beer: that was a Flanders Red, that was an Oud Bruin, etc., and when they were done I'd bottle the whole batch like I would any other.  But these days when I brew sours I don't really think of each batch as a beer in its own right.  Instead I've started to see them as possible components in future blends, or as a base for further experimentation.  The beers I'm most excited about at the moment are a Flanders Red-style beer that is aging on cherries and raspberries, and various saisons that are undergoing an extended secondary fermentation after being cut with a small amount of aged sour beer.  My goal in brewing more sours has become having more components around for projects of this sort.

With that in mind, when my bottle of this year's ECY20 arrived I started thinking about the best way to use it.  One vial is more than enough for several batches on the scale I brew at: last year I spread one vial between a number of beers, using some as a sole fermentor, some along with a sacch strain, and even adding some to beers that were already undergoing secondary fermentations.  This year my fermenter space was much more limited---both in terms of the number of fermenters available, and the room I had available for buying new ones---so I knew I would probably be more limited in the number of batches I could brew.  In the end I decided the best thing to do was to use most of it in another solera-style project, so that the diversity that characterizes the blend could be maintained into future batches.

What passes for a solera round here is pretty small fry: I brew two regular three gallon batches and combine them in a six gallon carboy.  The idea is that I can then pull off half of this into a three gallon carboy some time later and replace it with a single three gallon batch.  Later again, when I do the next pull from the six gallon batch, I could either pull from the three gallon carboy into smaller jugs and then top up with the pull from the main solera, or I could just pull into a new three gallon carboy so that I had beer at different ages readily on hand.  I already have a few batches going on this system, and I'll begin pulling from them and topping them up again in the next few months.

With the ECY20 batch I wanted to brew something that I could use for cutting future saisons, where the aged beer could provide microbial diversity and sourness and give me a higher overall yield (since I can just about brew four gallons of saison on my current equipment, then age this with one gallon of older beer in a five gallon carboy).  With that in mind I went for a relatively straightforward grist of 70% base malt and 30% adjunct, but to keep things interesting I varied the malts used in each batch: for the first I did a cereal mash with both spelt and buckwheat, hoping to provide some mouthfeel in the finished beer, and also perhaps some precursors for interesting flavours from the brettanomyces; for the second I went with a more typical blend of wheat and oats.  I'm hoping this beer will get reasonably sour, so to encourage the LAB I mashed on the higher side and kept the hopping rate below 15 IBUs.

The O.G. for both batches was 1.044, and they are currently fermenting separately in two different buckets; in a few weeks, after some of the yeast has dropped out, I'll combine them into the six gallon solera. I'm hoping to be able to take the first pull in around 6-8 months and to use it as part of some blended saisons.  Of course those will also have to age for a few months, so it will likely be almost a year before I get to taste any of this, but I'll at least have an ongoing source for future blends after that.

In Perpetuum: Flanders Red

For me, the end of summer is the best time to brew sour beers that will undergo an extended secondary fermentation.  It allows them to mature at cooler temperatures for most of the year before the hot and humid summer begins again.  Thankfully this summer hasn't been too hot, and judging by how they tasted when I sampled them recently, the sour beers that will be reaching the one year mark in the next few months have all managed to stay free of acetic acid and other strange flavours.

This year, instead of brewing a number of sours over a couple of months, I decided to use the Labour Day weekend to brew two double batches (i.e. 6 gallons total each) of a pale and a dark sour beer. As I've mentioned here before, while I'm generally happy doing smaller batches, three gallons of sour beer can seem like a disappointingly small pay off after waiting over a year for a beer to finish, and it leaves little scope for more interesting projects like making blended sours or using them to cut other beers.  Over the past few months I've been taking steps to increase the volume and age range of sour beers I have on hand, and doing double batches like this is a part of this process.

The dark beer I brewed was a Flanders Red, based on Jamil Zainasheff's recipe from Brewing Classic Styles.  This is the third time I've brewed this beer.  My first attempt would be two years old at this point, and might be the beer described in this post (details about why I don't know for sure are in the post!); my second is reaching the one year mark, and will be racked onto a blend of sour cherries and raspberries some time in the next month or two.  Both of those beers were fermented with Wyeast Roeselare and assorted dregs, and I was happy with the results---neither is blisteringly sour, but that suits my palate just fine.  This time I decided to try something different, so I picked up a vial of ECY02 (incidentally, its nice to see these staying available for more than a few hours at a time again---I'm sure its partly because Al is increasing production, but I can't help but think that the arrival of new companies like The Yeast Bay is also helping things here).

When the two batches have finished primary fermentation, I'll combine them into a single six gallon Better Bottle, as I did with this other pale sour.  If everything goes according to plan, I'm going to treat this as a solera as well, racking off three gallons into a smaller Better Bottle in 8-10 months and topping up with freshly fermented wort.  Hopefully I should be able to keep this going indefinitely, so that eventually I'll always have both pale and dark sours of different ages on hand.

My inspiration here is the process used at New Belgium, as described in Chapter 5 of American Sour Beers.  New Belgium brew two sour beers, nicknamed Felix and Oscar, the first pale and the second dark; these are aged in large oak foeders, and provide the base for all the sour beers that the brewery releases.  While they aren't exactly treating the foeders as a solera system, they do often leave 10-20% of a foeder full with old beer when adding fresh beer to ensure that each batch gets a good blend of bugs and bacteria.  One thing I found interesting in the chapter was the fact that they often leave larger proportions of soured beer, and have found that this decreases the time before the beer is ready for packaging.  I'll be interested to see whether brewing in a solera system at home changes the speed with which these beers mature: it would be great if, as well as increasing volume, this method also sped up production of aged sour beer.

In Perpetuum: Pale Sour Ale

Brewing on cheap equipment in a rented apartment constrains my process in various ways.  For the most part these are constraints I’m happy to work with, but one thing that has started to bother me in some instances is my small batch size.  It doesn’t matter so much in the running beers I make, since the turn around is supposed to be quick; but it can be disheartening to wait a year-plus for a batch of sour beer, only to find that if you let yourself enjoy it freely its almost gone a few months later.  What’s more, it limits the amount of beer I have lying around for other blending projects.  Dedicating 1.5 litres of sour to blend with a batch of saison amounts to reducing my batch size by almost 10%, which in a small batch is a significant loss.

I’ve taken various steps to remedy this.  The biggest has been getting a pipeline of sours going, so that I always have new batches ready to bottle; but even here I find that there’s something frustrating about starting from scratch each time, knowing that it will be a year until you get to drink this beer, and that it will probably be almost all gone in less than half that time.  This is part of what drew me to using small proportions of these older beers to cut younger beers, or to inoculate new batches, as it provides a way of extending each batch further.  Starting some kind of solera-system seemed like a natural extension of this.

Of course the idea of using a solera-style system for brewing beer is not a new one (even among home brewers), but people have started to do some very interesting things with it in recent years.  For instance, Michael Tonsmeire has shared lots of information about the the wine barrel soleras he shares with Nathan Zender.  They have a great set-up, pulling around 20 gallons every year, and then splitting this beer to treat in various different ways: e.g. adding hops, flowers, or fruit.  It provides an endless base for experimentation.

Most versions I’ve read about are done on a scale that would be impossible in my space, since I can’t house a barrel, and brewing 60 gallons of wort 3 gallons at a time would be a Herculean task.  But that doesn’t mean I can’t apply the same ideas on a smaller scale.  Brewing sixty gallons might be impossible, but I can easily do six gallons to fill a large carboy in a double brew day.  In fact, if I had 3 gallons of aged sour lying around, I’d only need a single batch to have something already well under way…

So that’s what I did. The base beer here is an 11 month old version of the Flanders Pale Ale recipe from Wild Brews. It was initially fermented with a new pack of Roeselare blend, and had about 10ml of ECY20 added to it after a few months in primary.  The beer has a lovely gentle brett funk at the moment---lots of hay and light farmyard---but, as is often the case with a first pitch of Roeselare, its still not very sour at all (see photo).   The recipe for the younger beer is slightly different (I’ll put it at the end of the post), and I intend to stick with this one in future. My hope is that there is a healthy array of brett and LAB at large in the aged beer, and that the addition of fresh beer (which finished relatively high at around 1.014) will provide them with what they need to increase the overall acidity.

This week I combined both 3 gallon batches in to a 6 gallon carboy bought specifically for this purpose. I’m planning to run this beer in a proper solera-style system: pulling out three gallons into another carboy in 9-12 months, and topping up the original with 3 gallons of fresh beer; then perhaps even pulling from the 3 gallons to fill smaller jugs 9-12 months after that, and refilling each vessel with beer from the next youngest batch.  Eventually, if I stay put long enough, I’ll have a range of blends at different ages: according to Michael Tonsemeire’s solera spreadsheet, assuming I pull half of each vessel every nine months, the three stages should eventually converge on 0.7, 2.2, and 3.7 years---though I doubt I’ll stay in this apartment long enough to see that happen. 

I’m thinking of this as the base for further beers, rather than something to be drank in its own right---something I might use to cut younger saisons, or add fruit or dry hops to.  For instance, the smaller volumes in the oldest vessel would be perfect for adding acidity too a blended sour or a saison. Based on my experience so far, it only takes about 15% to add noticeable acidity to a clean beer.

In fact, if this system works well, I’m thinking of trying it with other beers too: perhaps doing a double batch of a dark beer in another 6 gallon carboy, and running it in the same way with pulls every 9-12 months, so that I always have a range of light and dark sours on hand for blending.  (Here I’m again inspired by New Belgium’s process with their light and dark beers, Felix and Oscar, which you can read about in American Sour Beers.)

Recipe:

Measured O.G.	1.057
Measured F.G.
ABV.
Mash:	156°F
Malt:
42.9% Pilsner
42.9% 2-Row
10.7% Flaked Wheat
3.6% Flaked Oats
Hops:
EKG	60 min	21.4 IBUs	(25g@ 4.29%)
Yeast:
WY3522

In Perpetuum: Farmhouse Ale

The scale of most of the homebrew solera projects I’ve read about is beyond my means right now---I don’t have room for a barrel, and it would take me weeks to fill it even if I did.  But there’s no reason not to try something similar on a much smaller scale, and I have a couple of solera-style projects planned for this summer.  This post is about the first: a low gravity, hoppy farmhouse ale based on Jolly Pumpkin’s Bam Biere.

The original batch consists of around 4 gallons of a Bam Biere clone that I brewed at the start of the year.  The plan was to brew 5 gallons and drink it all this summer.  Although five gallons is more than my system can usually handle, I was trying to dial in a BeerSmith set up that would let me liquor down after the mash to reach the full volume for the boil.  Something went wrong, either with the BeerSmith profile or my process on brew day, and I ended up with 4 gallons of 1.042 wort, rather than 5 gallons of 1.037.  I should probably have added water to the fermenter once I realized this, but I decided to just keep the beer as it was.

Fast forward several months, and its time to transfer the beer onto the dry hops.  Rather than doing this with the full batch, I decided to siphon off 3 gallons into a Better Bottle with the dry hops and keep the remaining gallon to cut a second beer.  A few weeks ago I brewed up another batch of the base recipe, but in keeping with the “Farmhouse Ale” moniker, I substituted grains based on what I had available: in place of the flaked barley and Crystal 80 in the original I used unmalted spelt and English Medium Crystal.  Today, after I transferred the 3 gallons of the original onto some Triskel hops, I added around 3.5 gallons of this fully fermented new beer onto the remaining gallon of the original batch. 

My process here is based closely on Ron Jeffries’s at Jolly Pumpkin (which you can now read about in Chapter 5 of American Sour Beers!), but it also fits the practices Yvan de Baets describes in his essay on historical saisons.  At Jolly Pumpkin the fresh beer is fully fermented with a sacchromyces strain before the wild organisms are added by transferring the beer into barrels that have active colonies of brettanomyces and LAB.  This should suit this pseudo-solera style project, since the low gravity of the young beer should prevent the base from getting too sour as it receives fresh batches.  My thought was that I could do a new pull every couple of months, transferring 3 gallons onto (different?) hops and replacing it with another 3 gallons of young beer brewed to a similar recipe with whatever grains I have available.  The result would be a hoppy, sour Farmhouse Ale in perpetuum!

That, at any rate, was the plan.  Unfortunately when I transferred the beer this morning I picked up a bit of acetic character in the base.  Since I was short on the original batch there was a fair bit of head space left in the fermenter, and I’ve definitely opened it once or twice over the last few months to see how it was getting along.  The relatively large amount of oxygen in contact with the beer, combined with the warmer temperatures in the last month or two might have provided the perfect environment for acetobacter to thrive. If that is what’s happened it may only get worse as this second beer ages.  There is still some headspace at the top of the fermenter, and the temperatures are only going to get warmer as the summer progresses (I have limited temperature control beyond my fermentation chamber, so I spend the hot Chicago summers worrying about my sour beers).  One option I might take would be to top the carboy up with another beer so that there was no headspace at all.  From reading American Sour Beers I learnt that Vinnie Cilurzo at Russian River keeps some fairly neutral low gravity beer around for just this purpose.

My original plan was to let this second batch age all summer, but if I don’t top it up what I may do instead (assuming it doesn’t all turn to vinegar!) is pull the next 3 gallons in a month or so and then make sure I have enough to completely fill the fermenter afterwards.  Since the base beer is pretty dry when it goes into the fermenter, I could probably package it on the earlier side if I used heavy bottles and took the remaining gravity points into account.  In fact, since there should be healthy colonies of brettanomyces and LAB in the base beer, it may even be done by then---based on what he says in this interview, I think Ron Jeffries only leaves Bam Biere in barrels for a few weeks.  So I guess I’ll either top it up this week, or open the fermenter again in a month and see what’s happened.

Update: The thought of ending the summer with 5 gallons of malt vinegar has been niggling at me all day.  Luckily, in keeping with my usual practice I saved and strained the left over kettle wort from the rye saison I brewed this weekend to make starters with during the week.  When I got home this afternoon I watered some of this down, boiled it briefly to kill anything that had started to grow in the wort, and topped up the carboy until it was nearly full.  The wort isn’t an exact match to the Farmhouse Ale, but it shouldn’t change the flavours much, especially in such small quantities.  Hopefully the small fermentation caused by the fresh wort will flush any remaining oxygen out of the carboy.  Of course, there’s nothing I can do about the high temperatures that will surely come this summer.