Brew Day: Vatted Old Ale

Martyn Cornell's list of endangered British beers includes the following two styles in the "critically endangered" category:

Vatted old ale
About the only survivor of vatted old ale in Britain is Greene King 5X, which is, alas, almost never made available on its own, but generally blended with other beers to make, eg, Strong Suffolk. Up to the end of the Second World War, however, Old Beer, matured for a year or more in huge oak vats, was still popular in the West Country, particularly in Bristol. Few brewers, alas, have the time or space to make long-aged beers today.

Sour aged ale
A variety of vatted old ale is the sour aged ale represented now only by Gale’s Prize Old Ale, where a proportion of each brew is held back, solera-style, to add to the following year’s fresh ale. The complexity and depth available from such long-aged beers, particularly after several years in bottle, is stunning. Fuller’s rescued POA when Gale’s closed, but again, few brewers have the time or space to devote to such a minority beer.

As I've mentioned here before, I'm pretty interested in these almost extinct British beers, and already have several attempts to recreate them underway.  So far I have stock ales inoculated with lactobacillus and one or two strains of brettanomyces, but nothing with the full complement of LAB and wild yeasts found in other sour beers.  This week I decided to change that by a beer inspired by Gale's Prize Ale: something strong, intended for long ageing, and inoculated with a range of organisms.

My original plan was to brew this as another solera, and I may still implement that by making another batch in the next month and combining the two together into a six gallon carboy.  I would then pull off three to four gallons once a year, and top the carboy off with fresh wort.  This is similar to the way that Gale's is brewed at Fullers.  They no longer use the wood from the original brewery (this used to be the source of the inoculation), but instead hold back a portion of each batch to inoculate the next one.  But there is also historical precedent for brewing a strong beer in this style.  It seems to have been something that British manor brewers did with their strong ales, as recounted in this delightful description of "marrying ale" that I found on Ron Pattinson's blog:

The method called marrying ale, we have often seen tried upon a private person's stock with success. It seems to increase its strength, but especially its mellowness and the fulness of its flavour, and consists in tapping a pipe or hogshead of ale in the middle, and when it is drawn as low as the tap, to fill up the cask with another brewing of wort. The particulars to be observed are: to begin upon a sound stock, such as is approved as to colour and flavour; for if there be any approach to acidity it will not do. The next point is to tun the newly-fermented wort upon the old stock, when it has fermented about twelve hours. The third particular, of great importance, seems to be, not to marry your ale in winter, but in autumn (October), for if your cellar be not a vault,the old stock is too chill, and the fermentation may suddenly stop: if this should happen, as in cellars that are not vaults, the heat may increase considerably in spring, the fermentation may be renewed, and the ale may spoil, or mischief happen to the cask by bursting. Ale that is brewed in the usual way will sometimes ferment in summer, and throw up the bungs of the barrels; especially if the fermentation have been hastily conducted, and little or no cleansing have taken place in the barrels after tunning (which is likely to be the case when brewing is performed in frosty weather); where this happens, the danger is that acidity will follow, and therefore the beer should be speedily used. When ale is married, the fermentation will bring away all the old hops, and it is not to be overlooked that the cork will rise that had been driven in with the tap. It is, therefore, requisite to work it out at the bunghole, skimming away the hops, &c. till they and the cork are discharged; then fill up the cask, and take out the top cork for cleansing, as before. It may be filled up several times with fresh wort, as in other cases, until the fermentation stops, and then the cork and bung put in (the latter very lightly) and left so until it is necessary to hop it down. The writer has refilled a cask in this manner five years successively, and had the ale always superior, and always alike in colour and flavour; in continuing this practice for a long period it is necessary to remove the casks for fear of accidents. The excellence of this ale is, that you can never guess at its age; it drinks always soft and mild, without any resemblance to ale recently brewed, and is equally remote from hardness or acidity

Lars Garshol describes a similar process implemented by walloon ironsmiths who emigrated to Sweeden in the 17th century.  It seems these workers missed beers from home (perhaps something akin to Flanders Red or Oud Bruin):

To satisfy their craving for walloon beer, the walloons started brewing their own beer. Out of this brewing quickly developed what seems to be a Swedish variation: hundred-year beer (hundraårig öl). This was a beer primarily made for the aristocratic owners of iron works or major mansions. 

It was brewed the same way as the walloon beer, and then stored in big wooden tuns. After a few years, half the beer would be drained off and bottled, and a new batch would be used to fill up the barrel again. This would go on for, in quite a few cases, many decades. The barrel would never be emptied, so it could literally be said to be hundred-year beer, although obviously the beer from a century ago would be present only "in homeopathic concentration" as one source put it.

Lars' post was the immediate inspiration for brewing this beer, and on his recommendation I sought out a copy of Country House Brewing in England by Pamela Sambrook, which I still haven't got round to reading.

I didn't agonize too much over my recipe for my beer.  The old recipe for Gale's Prize Ale was pretty straightforward: Maris Otter and a touch of Black Patent, with around 10% invert sugar.  Apparently Fullers have changed it since taking over the brand, using Optic, crystal, and chocolate malts.  I would have liked to have used all English malt for the base, but I'm running low until the next group buy in a few months, so I made do with a blend of US 2-row and Golden Promise.  I added about 5% medium crystal, and then on brew day cooked up a batch of invert #3 (via the dilution method) to make up about 10% of the grist by weight (not by extract).  I knew I was going to have problems hitting the high original gravity I wanted (somewhere around 1.090), so at the last moment I also added about half a cup of homemade Belgian candi syrup that's been lying around for ages.  Altogether this produced a rich chestnut-coloured wort in the vicinity of 1.090.  I hopped the beer to around 50 IBUs (the reported bitterness for Gale's), using some old Northdown hops for bittering and a blend of EKG and Fuggles for a 20 minute flavour addition.

My plan was to ferment the beer with a large amount of freshly top-cropped Wyeast 1318, along with the final 10-15 mls of a jar of ECY20 that I purchased last year.  I pitched both together so that the bacteria and wild yeasts had a chance to get established, but given that the beer will have a very high alcohol content I'm not expecting it to get too sour---in fact, I'm hoping it won't, since I'm looking for something more vinous, with a soft acidity and some light leathery funk.  Something I can bottle by itself, but also use as an interesting component in blended beers.  I gave the wort a healthy dose of oxygen, and the beer is now fermenting in the low 60s, hopefully keeping higher alcohols etc. in check.

If things go to plan I'll probably brew up a second batch in the next month or so, this time fermented with Wyeast 1318 alone since it will be blended with the inoculated beer in a six gallon carboy (still waiting for another 2-for-1 offer!).  Then, following the Swedish brewers described in Lars' post, I'll take a pull and top it up again around Christmas each year until I move out of here (which may mean only once or twice).

Failure: Spontaneous Fermentation

A little over a month ago I tried my first foray into brewing a spontaneously fermented beer.  I decided at the start that along as it started fermenting within a week or two, I'd let the beer age out no matter how bad it tasted at first.  Sadly the beer failed to cross even this low hurdle!

I started to write up a post about my process anyway, and in doing it I found myself thinking about why a home brewer would be interested in fully spontaneous beers at all.  In the end I wound up with a rather long and rather rambling discussion of that topic.  I've decided to post the whole thing, in case it was helpful or of interest to other homebrewers: the first half discusses my process, and the second half contains some general layman's thoughts on spontaneous fermentation.

Process

First, the background stuff that is largely irrelevant now that the beer's been ditched. The grist was a blend of wheat malt and pilsner, with about 100g of flaked oats steeped in the wort after mashout to add some starch (in place of a more traditional turbid mash).  I boiled for only ninety minutes, using aged pellet hops at a rate of 4-5 grams per litre.

After flameout, I transferred the kettle to a spot adjacent to an open window and wrapped it up in the insulation I use while mashing (a cut-up exercise mat and a sleeping bag).  Here I was trying to follow advice that Cantillon's Jean van Roy gave to homebrewers in this interview with Basic Brewing Radio (direct link to audio).  He mentions the cooling rate of the wort as a potentially significant difference between beers brewed at Cantillon and beers brewed on a smaller scale: their larger volume of wort takes considerably longer to cool, and this might determine the kind of organisms that are dominant in the wort over the following days.  As evidence of this he mentions a beer brewed on a smaller scale at a local commune that didn't turn out so well---so anecdotal evidence at best, but I thought it was still worth implementing.

After wrapping the kettle in the sleeping bag I removed the lid and covered the opening with a thin mesh bag, then left the kettle by the open window to cool overnight.  The forecast was for temperatures just above freezing, but there had been some colder nights in the preceding week.  Next morning the beer was still in the low 80s, significantly warmer than the temperatures mentioned by Jean van Roy (I'd have to listen again, but I think he mentions temperature that are 10-20 degrees lower).  I transferred the beer to a sealed carboy to let it cool further, but in hindsight I wonder if I shouldn't have left it out for a longer inoculation.  This is one of the points at which I will change my process if I do this again: perhaps longer exposure at lower temperatures would have encouraged inoculation by wild yeast?

Lambic brewers rely as much on organisms inhabiting their barrels as they do on the spontaneous inoculation during cooling, so to imitate this aspect of their process I soaked an oak spiral in my gallon jug of "house culture" for several weeks before brew day, then added it to the cooled wort hoping that it would introduce further diversity into the fermentation.  This is the second point at which I will change my process if I do this again.  I was essentially relying on the spiral for the main inoculation, and I worry that by only leaving it in the house culture for a few weeks I didn't give the brettanomyces and other organisms enough time to establish themselves in the wood. This might also explain the fact that fermentation didn't start as I'd expected.

After inoculation, I waited patiently for signs of fermentation.  A few days in I saw a thin white pellicle form on top of the wort (blurry photo below), which made me optimistic that things were going to plan.  But then after that nothing happened.  Five, six, seven days past and the wort looked exactly the same: a thin white pellicle on top, but no activity in the airlock and no other signs of fermentation.

Eventually, after almost two weeks, I decided to open the fermenter up and take some measurements.  To my disappointment the beer had only dropped a few gravity points, and its pH was still up at around 4.9.  That was high enough that I didn't want to risk tasting it, so I transferred the wort to a smaller carboy to see if the oxygen pick-up helped start a fermentation.  But everything seemed the same the next day, and I decided to give it up.  It wasn't the first beer I've poured down the drain, and it probably won't be the last!

Thoughts on Spontaneous Fermentations

While going through all of this I was thinking a lot about why a homebrewer might be interested in spontaneous fermentation in the first place.  Obviously it has to do with the fact that Belgian lambic brewers use these processes to make such wonderful beers---but can we be more specific about what it is we're trying to imitate, in a way that might help with translating these practices to a smaller scale?  What follows are my own half-baked reflections on why I am interested in spontaneous fermentation, and why I'll probably give it another shot next year.

I'm sure that for a lot of people the allure of spontaneous fermentation comes from the idea of capturing local yeasts and bacteria that might provide a unique range of flavours by the end of fermentation.  I suppose there are two distinct points here: first, the desire for "sense of place", which is often expressed in terms of the notion of "terroir" (there's been a lot of talk about "place-based beer" recently); and second, a desire for the unique range of flavours produced by mixed fermentations.

I'm certainly attracted by the idea of a house character arising from mixed fermentation that would create a distinctive and recognizable flavour profile in my beers; but I don't know that I care if this comes from "local" organisms, bottle dregs, commercial strains, or a mix of all three.  (I guess I'm a little skeptical about the way ideas like "terroir" and "sense of place" are used in marketing beer.  I've been making my way through Authentic Wine in the past few weeks, and one thing that became apparent very early on was how complicated and contested a notion terroir is in the wine world.)

But anyway, if what you want is local organisms there's no need to go through the risk of trying a spontaneously fermented batch; you can try to capture them on a smaller scale in leftover wort, grow them up selectively based on sensory impressions, and pitch as you would a regular yeast.  This is how Jester King cultivated their house culture.  That seems like a much more reliable option than the techniques used by lambic brewers, and its one that's been adapted successfully on a home brew scale.

On the other hand, what if you just want to a mixed fermentation, and don't really care if the organisms are "local"?  The obvious answer is that you can pitch a variety of dregs and cultures at the start of fermentation or as it progresses, but this won't get you anything like the diversity of organisms present in traditional spontaneously fermented lambic (see e.g. this paper).  General consensus seems to be that by the time they are bottled there are only a few organisms active in these beers, and commercial blends are usually limited to a few strains of yeast and LAB.  But why might such diversity be desirable?

This brings me to another reason for imitating the practices of lambic brewers: to encourage a similar fermentation cycle as the one found in their beers.  As lambic ages, different organisms become dominant, fermenting out the remaining sugars and modifying byproducts left by activity earlier in the fermentation.  One thought you might have here is that the sugars and other compounds available at each point play an important role in shaping the flavour profile of the final beer.

Let me give you an example of what I mean, based on my layman's understanding of Wild Brews and the paper I mentioned above about the organisms present in lambic wort. We know that the dominant organisms in the first few days after fermentation are enterobacter.  That might seem to be something undesirable, since these bacteria produce fatty acids and create various unpleasant off-flavours.  In fact, Jeff Sparrow mentions that some lambic brewers have taken steps to prevent this stage of the fermentation (though, based on the paper, that is clearly not true of Cantillon).  However the fatty acids produced by the activity of enterobacter can act as precursors for ester formation by brettanomyces.  In other words, these wild yeasts take an unpleasant compound like butyric acid, which is produced by the enterobacter and smells rancid; and convert it into another compound, ethyl butyrate, which smells like juicy fruit, pineapple, and cognac!  That being the case, some small amount of initial activity by enterobacter might actually be desirable, as it would produce compounds that could be transformed at a later stage in the fermentation.

What about sugars?  Reading through Wild Brews again I was also struck by the claim that the activity of enterobacter in the early days and weeks of fermentation might shape the rest of the cycle, since the enterobacter will consume amino acids in the wort before the saccharomyces get a chance to use them. This will slow down the growth of the yeast and limit their ability to ferment the wort---Sparrow gives O.G.s of 1.022 after 3-4 months, and 1.012 after about 8-12 months. That means that there is lots of fermentable sugar left when Lactic Acid Bacteria become the dominant organisms and take over fermentation. It also means that brettanomyces doesn't become active until relatively late in fermentation, since it grows even slower than saccharomyces, especially in this nutrient poor environment.

So here we have one early stage of fermentation, distinctive of spontaneous beers, that shapes the rest of the cycle by determining the sugars available as each organism becomes dominant and by ensuring there are various compounds present in the beer.  I find the numbers that Sparrow provides quite striking: I don't think I've ever had a beer with an O.G. in between 1.040-50 be as high as 1.022 after three months of secondary fermentation, and I've certainly never had one be as high as 1.012 after a year. What's more, based on what these books say I suspect that the fermentation cycle of a typically inoculated home brew looks pretty different from a traditional lambic; for instance, I'd guess that brettanomyces becomes dominant much earlier in the fermentation, even if its population grows slower than saccharomyces.

Does any of this matter?  I'm not sure. Its certainly true that you can make great sour beer without a spontaneous fermentation.  Its also true that you might be able to achieve some of the same effects by other means.  For instance, Vinnie Cilurzo at Russian River imitates the cycle of lambics by staggering the inoculation of the wort with different organisms (though homebrewers don't seem to have had as much success with this process---perhaps because Vinnie can halt fermentation by filtering the saccharomyces out before he transfers the beer, leaving plenty of fermentables for the LAB and brett).  And perhaps most importantly of all, a fully spontaneous inoculation is a risky affair, especially if you're relying on a single batch rather than the wide range of barrels a real lambic blender can pull from.  There's no guarantee that the brettanomyces will clean up the off-flavours produced by the enterobacter, and there are other risks here too (e.g. the enterobacter will produce acetic acid, which is undesireable in anything other than small amounts and might encourage the formation of an excess of ethyl acetate, making the beer smell like nail polish).

As I finish writing this, my thoughts keep coming back to the long slow fermentation cycle of lambic beers.  One reason that Dave Marliave gave for adding starch to the wort (in imitation of a turbid mash) was that it would extend the life-cycle of the beer: whereas a beer that was mashed high or had maltodextrin in it would be fully fermented after a year or so, in a beer with a starchy wort the slow breakdown of complex starches would result in more residual sugar in a year-old beer, leaving a more balanced flavour profile and creating an extended period of development.  The slower fermentation resulting from the various organisms involved in lambics would also have the same result.

At any rate, I'd certainly like to give spontaneous fermentation another shot, if only so that I can see first hand how such a beer develops over time.

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.

Brew Day: Aged Hop Saison

One thing that comes up repeatedly in Yvan de Baets' essay on historical saisons is the affinities these beers had with lambic and gueuze.  Yvan mentions the "wine-like character" of well-made beers, a vinous and sour side accompanied by the distinctive aromas associated with wild yeasts and barrel-aging.  Obviously the mixed fermentation, along with the practice of cutting young beers with sour older beer, go some way towards explaining these connections.  One other thing mentioned in the chapter is the use of aged hops:

"It is likely that when a brewer wished to produce a saison with a predominant sourness, he would use a greater proportion of old hops so as not to contribute too much bitterness and to encourage the development of lactic bacteria.  Farmhouse breweries would most likely have a stock of old or imperfectly stored hops on hand.  The use of older hops was frequent, bringing saisons close to traditional lambic."

I happened to have about 50g of aged pellet hops left over from a failed attempt at making a wort for spontaneous fermentation (more on that in another post), so this weekend I decided to try making a saison along these lines.  The grist was nothing special---my usual mix of about 90% pilsner to 10% wheat----and all of the hops went in at the start of the boil.  I maxed out my kettle/mash-tun again, making over four gallons of wort which will be fermented out in primary by Wyeast 3726.  Rather than going for a mixed primary fermentation, I decided to combine this four gallons of wort with one gallon of the adjunct sour I brewed a few months ago, blending them for an extended secondary fermentation.  The adjunct sour is already down around 1.000, but its still plenty cloudy and already fairly tart, so I'm hoping that it will continue to sour as the starches are decomposed.  I expect the saison portion to finish pretty dry, but this strain often leaves a few gravity points after secondary which the LAB can consume.  I'm not planning on aging it quite as long as I would for a lambic-style beer, but at the moment I'm assuming it will spend at least 6-8 months in secondary.

I'll be curious to see what kind of difference the aged hops make to the flavour profile of the finished beer.  I rather enjoy the mouthfeel and bitterness you get from using large quantities of low alpha hops, but assuming these were aged properly there should be very little bitterness by the time I start drinking this beer.  Some people speculate that the fatty acids provided by aged and oxidized hops provide precursors for ester production by brettanomyces, leading to the aromas characteristic of lambic-style beers.  Perhaps I'll get some of that here as well.  The main thing now is exercising some patience, as I'm running out of carboy space and many of the beers I've brewed over the past few months won't be ready until at least late 2015.

Brew Day: Nineteenth Century IPA

This weekend I brewed another in the series of beers inspired by old English stock ales: an IPA based on Mitch Steele's descriptions of the beers brewed in Burton-upon-Trent in the nineteenth century.  It was actually reading that book that first prompted me to start brewing English-style beers inoculated with brettanomyces---the role played by wild yeasts in British brewing is mentioned several times in the opening chapters, and there's also a few paragraphs about their role in IPAs in particular in the chapter devoted to Burton IPAs.  But more on that below.  I'll spend the rest of the post explaining how I came up with my recipe and process for the beer.

Water.  The importance of the mineral profile of Burton brewing water has been recognized since these beers were first brewed there.  Steele mentions that as the popularity of IPA increased, some companies opened new breweries in Burton to take advantage of the local water, while others began adding salts to mimic its profile.  But since brewers were drawing from various sources (wells, the river itself, etc.), its a little difficult to say exactly what the mineral profile of their water would have been like, though it would certainly have had high sulfate and calcium levels.   Rather than "Burtonizing" my Chicago water, I decided to simply add enough gypsum to get my sulfate levels around 300ppm---lower than many "Burton" water profiles, but high enough to lower my mash pH and significantly shape the flavour profile of the final beer.

Malt. Rather than use an English base malt I went with Dingemans pilsner in an effort to emulate the white malt used by IPA brewers.  Steele mentions that "[w]hite malt is very similar to today's Pilsner malt, which, interesingly, was itself developed after an industrial espionage mission by Czech brewers into England's best malthouses".  I suppose something like Thomas Fawcett lager malt might be a good approximation, but I went with what I had on hand.

Hops. The hops were supposed to be 100% East Kent Goldings---a lot of them!---based on the hopping schedule for the 1839 Reid IPA in Ron's excellent book.  I was actually a little short, so I ended up adding a small amount of hallertau to make up the ninety minute addition. Really I should be using this year's crop, following the practice of the Burton brewers who used their freshest hops in these beers---but it will probably be a few months until they show up on the US market, and the Goldings I used have been stored frozen and vacuum-sealed since I purchased them.  I may try to find some fresher ones when I dry-hop it next year (more on that below).

Mash. Steele also outlines the kind of mashing schedules used by breweries during this period, but I didn't take any special steps to imitate them, going instead for my usual single-infusion mash at around 149°F, aiming to end up with a highly fermentable wort that will produce a dry beer.

Fermentation. Now the fun stuff.  Primary fermentation will be done by Wyeast 1028, but this evening I'll also be pitching dregs from a bottle of my brett-fermented wit, which contains White Labs brettanomyces clausenii and trois.  Hopefully these strains will be well-enough established to promote a long, slow secondary fermentation as the beer matures.

Steele devotes a couple of paragraphs at the end of the chapter on Burton IPAs to speculation about the role played by brettanomyces in their secondary fermentation, quoting Clausen on the role these yeast played in developing "that peculiar and remarkably fine flavour" characteristic of the best English stock ales.  Ron also has some interesting research on his blog, including evidence that Bass pale ale had brettanomyces in it as late as the 1940s.  It seems likely that the beer picked up these wild yeasts from the wooden casks it was aged in (although, based on these notes from Adnams brewer Brian Lee, brettanomyces was all over their brewhouse in the 1940s, including in the bottling line!).  Steele speculates that it accounted for the dryness of the beer and its sparkling condition on reaching India after being completely flat when shipped.  If you read through the comments on Ron's post, he and others make some interesting speculation about the character of these beers, mentioning Orval as a beer that might be somewhat similar (and perhaps even historically linked to English pale ale brewing).  All interesting stuff!

I'll probably bottle the beer in 9-12 months, dry-hopping for a week or two beforehand.  Based on descriptions in Steele's book, and questions I've asked Ron by email, I think that the Burton IPAs were probably aged on dry-hops for several months or longer.  It seems that this might even have played a role in promoting secondary fermentation.  I'm undecided as to whether I should copy this part of their process---they surely knew what they were doing, but it goes against what I've been taught by contemporary brewing practice.  If I had a bigger batch, I'd split it into two 3 gallon carboys and try both, but since I'm only making 3 gallons I'm a bit wary of taking the risk and ending up with vegetal and grassy flavours in the final beer.

Well, that's it for now.  I haven't decided whether to make an imperial stout as well---more on that next weekend I guess.  Now that I'm finishing up with these stock ales for the time being, I'll soon be back to brewing Farmhouse Ales again, and I have a couple of fun ideas for things to try out over the next couple of months.

Recipe:

Measured O.G: 1.057
Measured F.G:

Mash: 149°F:

Malt:

100%  Pilsner

Hops:

EKG               90               84.7 IBUs     (85g@5%)
EKG               60               64.8 IBUs     (65g@5%)
EKG               30               33.0 IBUs     (65g@5%)


Yeast:

Wyeast 1028

Brew Day: Stock Ale

Following on from the sour red ale I brewed last week, today I brewed a strong brown beer based loosely on nineteenth century recipes for stock ales.  The grist and hopping rates are based on the recipe for the 1887 Fuller's XXK in Ron Pattinson's book, but I decreased the amount of invert #3 slightly, and added a small percentage of dark crystal to imitate the effects of kettle caramelisation,  The beer will be fermented out with  a large pitch of Wyeast 1318, and I'm also planning to add the dregs from a bottle of my brett-fermented wit later this evening, which should consist of lactobacillus, brettanomyces trois and brettanomyces clausenii.  The high hopping rate probably means I won't see much contribution from the lactobacillus, but hopefully the two brett strains will be well enough established to ensure a long slow secondary fermentation.

When I was picking a recipe for this beer, one thing I kept wondering about was how far back I'd have to go to find a recipe for something that was likely to have had undergone a secondary fermentation of this sort.  In Principles & Practice of Brewing (Walter J. Sykes & Arthur R. Ling, 1907), there is a description of the long slow secondary fermentation that took place while stock ales were stored in vats or casks.  They state that during this fermentation "maltodextrins are gradually and slowly degraded by the hydrolytic action of the special yeasts" and "certain compound ethers or esters are also formed" that are "much concerned in the fine flavour characteristic of fully ripened and mature ales".  But having described this slow conditioning, the authors go on to complain that it is falling out of fashion:

"[T]he demand for beers of this class seems to be gradually passing away; the tendency nowadays is towards less ripe and mature ales, and consequently the period of storage is often reduced to weeks, or is even omitted altogether."

They were writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, but it seems that at least some aged beers survived this trend.  In Amber, Gold, and Black, Martyn Cornell mentions a beer called Colne Spring Ale which was deliberately infected with brettanomyces, and which seems to have survived with secondary conditioning well into the twentieth century (Cornell mentions that it survived the 1957 takeover of Benskin's by IndCoope, and states that it was pasteurized after this point rather than bottle conditioned).  These 1958 tasting notes from Andrew Campbell are worth quoting in full:

"[Colne Spring Ale] is probably the strongest of all the commercially available bottled beers available in Britain today.  Matured for seven years, it is dark, mellow, and pours like wine, very slightly carbonated.  It is rich and luscious in flavour, in no way edulcorated [sweenteened] ... beer that should be treated with the very greatest respect."

The beer I brewed today is part of an ongoing effort to try to recreate some of these older brettanomyces-influenced British beers.  So far I have the Keeping Porter, the Stingo, and this strong stock ale.  In the next few months I'm planning on brewing a nineteenth century IPA, and perhaps also an Imperial Stout, both again to be inoculated with brett (in fact, I'll probably keep using the dregs from the last remaining bottles of the wit beer to do this).  With any luck, in a year or so all of these beers will be tasting pretty good, and stable enough to bottle (though I'll probably bottle the darker ones flat, or with very low carbonation, so continued fermentation shouldn't be a problem).But even if they dry out too much or gett too funky, I'm sure they'll make a good basis for blending with each other, or with young beers in the glass.

Recipe:

Measured O.G: 1.076 (Aiming for 1.080)
Measured F.G:

Mash: 153.5°F:

Malt:

43.3%  Paul's Mild Malt

33.7%  TF Golden Promise
2.9%  Medium Crystal
1.9%  TF Dark Crystal II
18.2% Invert 3#

Hops:

Fuggles          60          45.7 IBUs
EKG              30          37.4 IBUs

Yeast:

Wyeast 1318

Process: Adjuncts, Starches, and Sour Beers

The second beer I brewed over the Labour Day weekend was a pale sour inspired loosely by the practices of Belgian lambic makers.  I say loosely because I did not perform a turbid mash, and I pitched a vial of ECY01 rather than allowing the wort to be inoculated by ambient microbes.  But I did try to produce a starchy wort by other means, and its that process that I want to describe in this post.

The basic idea is to add some starch to the wort at some point after the enzymes from the mash have been denatured, so that this starch is not broken down and makes its way into the fermenting beer; while the Saccharomyces will be unable to ferment it, the Brettanomyces and other bacteria are capable of breaking the starch down into sugars and eventually fermenting it out.  

I first got the idea to do this from an interview with Dave Marliave of Flat Tail Brewing on this episode of the Sunday Session .  In the interview, Marliave describes adding flaked oats to wort post-boil to mimic the starchy wort produced by the turbid mash that lambic brewers use. He states that these starches take much longer to breakdown and ferment out than other complex sugars, so that the overall effect is to prolong the lifecycle of the beer.  It might mean, for instance, that a sour brewed in this way still had some residual sweetness and body a year or two into fermentation, and might continue to develop over a longer period.  So the idea here is not just to provide food for the bacteria so that they produce enough acid (this might also be achieved by mashing high or adding maltodextrin); its to extend the life of the beer, and change the way its flavour profile develops over time.

The method I use is a variation of the one that Marliave describes.  After I've raised my mash to mash-out temperatures and removed the bag with the grist, I add another small mesh bag filled with between 100-200g of flaked oats.  I steep these in the wort for five to ten minutes while I bring it up to a boil, then remove them and give the bag a quick squeeze.  The result is a very cloudy and turbid wort, as you can see from the photo at the start of the post.

When I first heard the interview, I started this thread on HBT to see if other people had used the technique.  If you browse through it, you can find links to other people trying the same kind of thing: some use flaked oats, others add flour to the boil.  This episode of Basic Brewing Radio includes an interviewer with a home brewer who adds pasta to her secondary fermenters with the same goal in mind.

This is the second time I've used the process.  The first beer I brewed is around nine months old at this point, and I took a quick sample this week before writing this post.  So far, the results are promising, and in line with what Marliave describes.  The beer is still a bit turbid, but has cleared considerably over the course of the year.  I have no way of knowing how much of this is breakdown of starches and how much precipitation of proteins etc.  The aroma was mainly lemons and light funk, and the beer tasted lightly sour with some noticeable residual sweetness and body.  At this point it is not a particularly exciting beer, but at nine months old its still relatively young, and I plan on leaving it for at least another six to eight months before I even think about bottling it.

The two batches I brewed this weekend were based on a fairly straight-forward lambic style wort: 60% pilsner and 40% malted wheat.  A few months ago I went through my freezer and took out a bunch of hops from the 2011 harvest and earlier and put them in a brown paper bag in my brew closet to speed up their ageing.  They could probably used a few more months, but I decided to use 30-40g per batch anyway.  Since I was not relying on inoculation from ambient microbes, I didn't need the bacteriostatic properties of the hops to check unwanted bacteria.  But there's some evidence that fatty acids and other products of oxidation in aged hops can be converted by brettanomyces into the ester compounds characteristic of aged sour beers (see p.42 of American Sour Beers for brief discussion of this research), and that seems like reason enough to try using them.

Once primary fermentation is over, I plan to combine 5 gallons in a Better Bottle, which I may end up treating as another solera.  The remaining gallon or so will be aged in jugs, but I plan on blending it with another saison in a few months and then letting this mature for a year or so.

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.

Tasting Notes: Lochristi Grisette

Inspired by this excellent write up at Ale of the Riverwards, I thought I'd come back to one of the beers I hadn't written about from my first order from The Yeast Bay.  It is a grisette fermented with Wyeast 3522, with half a vial of the Lochristi blend added in secondary; I also added some oak cubes that were fresh from a beer fermented with lactobacillus and White Labs brett trois.

I called it a Grisette for no better reason than that it had a high percentage of wheat and oats (see recipe below).  This ended up giving the beer a slightly creamy body that I'm not too keen on, which is exacerbated by the low carbonation and light hopping. I deliberately aimed for this low carbonation, expecting the brettanomyces to eat through the last remaining gravity points---but there's been little change since bottling. Its developed a light but definite tartness during secondary, which might mean that some lactobacillus survived on the oak cubes---though this could also be from the brettanomyces, since the website blurb says it can "impart a pleasant acidity over time".

The blend itself doesn't really shine in this beer, but I think that's a problem with the recipe more than anything else.  The second beer I fermented with this blend was a golden sour.  I transferred this onto 3 lbs of peaches a few weeks ago, at which point it had a similar flavour profile to this beer, but with more sourness and funk to back it up.  Hopefully the peaches will elevate it further.

Appearance: Hazy golden colour.  Head dissipates to a thin cap leaving some lacing.

Smell: There's a distinctive aroma profile I've found in both beers brewed with this blend, but its hard to find words to describe it beyond generic descriptions like "fruity".  The blurb on the website mentions strawberries, and I think I can see that, but to me its more of a green unripe strawberry than a luscious fresh berry.  There's perhaps some yellow citrus fruit too, and as I swirl up the glass I get more musty and earthy funk beneath the fruit.

Taste: Lightly sour, slightly lemony, and maybe a touch of orange peel.  Its comes together nicely, but its hard to pick out individual flavours.

Mouthfeel: The carbonation is low, and the mouthfeel fairly creamy.  For me, this detracts from the beer: I think if it were more spritzy it would be very refreshing, and the flavours might pop out more.

Drinkability & Notes: Not a bad beer by any means, but not particularly memorable either.  The contribution from the Lochristi blend is pleasant but subtle, and not enough to carry the beer by itself.  The light lactic tartness helps, but really it needs higher carbonation and maybe a dry hop to liven it up a bit.


Recipe:

Measured O.G.	1.041
Measured F.G.	1.002
ABV.	5.1%
Mash:	149°F
Malt:
64% 2-Row
18.3% Wheat Malt
9.1% Vienna 5.4% Golden Naked Oats 3.2% Table Sugar
Hops:
Hallertau (US)	60 min	23.9 IBUs	(25g@ 5.4%)
Styrian Goldings	15 min	5.8 IBUs	(20g@ 3.29%)
Fuggles (US)	2 min	0.9 IBUs	(15g@ 4.1%)
Yeast:
WY3522; Lochristi Blend

         

Tasting Notes: Biere de Coupage (Brett Fermented Wit)

When I told J I was making a witbier she asked me why, and with good reason: neither of us like them all that much.  Its probably in part because I haven't sought out many good ones, but in my limited experience witbiers are often creamy and a little sweet, whereas I prefer dryer beers that finish bitter and/or sour.  Its no surprise, then, that the wheat beers I tend to enjoy have a tart snap to them (like Jolly Pumpkin's Calabaza Blanca , or New Belgium's Snapshot), nor that when I've brewed wheat beers in the past its been styles like berlinerweisse or gose.  And yet here I was, brewing a straight up witbier...  Well, kind of.

The original inspiration for this beer came from an old article by Chad Yakobson in Zymurgy.  It included a recipe for a brettanomyces-fermented wit---probably an early version of Crooked Stave's St. Bretta.  I'd never tried that beer, but I thought it might be interesting to brew something along the same lines and ferment it with a couple of strains of brettanomyces.  As I mentioned in the earlier post, I was a little disappointed with the finished beer, so at bottling I cut it 3:1 with a no-boil sour I brewed earlier this summer.  Tasting notes below are for this blended beer.

Appearance: Hazy yellow colour.  Head retention is OK from a vigorous pour, but I like a more billowing head on this one.

Smell:  Very light grapefruit and general citrus, with a musty brett funk beneath it.  Aroma comes across as slightly sweet, if that makes sense.

Taste: Starts with doughy and slightly sweet wheat, and rounds out with a nice tartness at the end.  Grapefruit is there in the background, but I'd like it to pop out more.  Probably partly a result of using out of season fruit, but maybe I need to change other aspects of my process (adding more zest, adding juice, changing when I make these additions, etc.)

Mouthfeel:  Carbonation is a little low.  It begins with a fairly full and creamy mouthfeel, but the tart finish cuts right through it and makes the beer very moreish.

Drinkability & Notes: To my taste, cutting this beer with the no boil sour improved it immeasurably.  Where before it was cloying and dull, its now quite refreshing and drinkable.  There's no sign of over-carbonation yet (and if anything, I wish carbonation were a little higher)---I'm not planning on aging any of this, but I'll keep at least one or two bottles around for a month or so to see if this changes.  Perhaps the tartness will increase, along with the carbonation? I would also like the citrus to be more forward, and the whole thing to be brighter, but all things considered I'm satisfied with how this turned out.  I might even make another witbier some day soon!

Tasting Notes: Biere de Coupage (Pale Saison)

Here's some tasting notes for one of the beers I'm most excited about at the moment: a young and hoppy saison blended with a small portion of aged sour beer.  You can read some longer posts about the historical background to this process here and here, with more post about other beers I've made this way here.  I gave a bottle of this to Michael Thorpe of Spontaneous Funk, and I've included his tasting notes at the end of the post.  (For other posts on this technique, see the links here.)

Appearance: Pale golden colour.  The head dissipates quickly and almost completely, leaving minimal lacing.

Smell: Predominantly the juicy stone fruit / canned pineapple juice I usually get from my house culture.  Light blackcurrant and floral notes, and a gentle earthy funk in the background.

Taste: Stone fruits, citrus rind, soft but definite acidity (the beer is more sour than tart), slight metallic bitterness, but not at all unpleasant.  Really quite lovely actually.

Mouthfeel: Prickly carbonation.  Could be a touch higher perhaps, though for me its fine where it is.  Beer finishes dry but is not at all thin, probably thanks to the glycerol from the WY3711

Drinkability & Notes: I'm pretty delighted with this beer.  It doesn't have the complexity of an aged sour, but its very drinkable, and I think the light but still mouth-watering acidity takes it a cut above my other saisons.  I'm suprised by just how much of a difference such a small proportion (~15%) of aged sour made to the final beer.  Needless to say, I'll be using this technique again.

I'll be interested to see how the beer ages.  I bought another bottle of BFM √225 Saison to compare it with, and where I'd loved that beer before I now found it a bit disappointing.  I think the hops had become slightly oxidized, detracting from the bright and juicy character I'd enjoyed in younger bottles.  Perhaps with a bit more time the brettanomyces profile would come to dominate and take the beer in a different direction (this would fit with what Garrett Crowell told me about Jester King beers in his email).

Michael's Notes: Starts with a nice and fairly subtle petit saison base, transitioning into a bit of acidity and light fruitiness. A bit of the leafy/earthy character that I always associate with 3711, though in a good way, and not overpowering like it often becomes with 6+% saisons done with it. Nice spritzy carbonation; very light. Quite easy drinking, and definitely a nice warm weather beer. Would certainly order another pint!

Brew Day: Stingo

I continue to be fascinated by the role wild yeasts and other bacteria would have played in older English beers, and the ways in which British brewing traditions might have overlapped with those surviving on the continent.  The July/August issue of Zymurgy had a short article on a beer called "Stingo", which it described as an English strong ale associated with Yorkshire.  Since I was reading everything I could find about these aged stock ales, I decided to do a little bit of internet research about "Stingo", and marked the recipe down as one I might try this summer.

Digging around online I discovered that Pretty Things and Boulevard had joined up to brew a beer inspired by Yorkshire Stingo.  In interviews connected with the collaboration, Dan and Martha from Pretty Things engage in some intriguing speculation about the connections between British stock ales and the acid ales of the Flanders region:

“In the mid-1800s Eugene Rodenbach, who was maybe the third generation of the brewery was sent to do an internship in the north of England and when he came back to the brewery he brought with him the beer we know today, this blended, aged, brown, malty beer. So obviously Rodenbach in almost no way resembles anything that’s presently brewed in the north of England.” 

“But it did back then,” Martha continued. “So the roots were borrowed from Yorkshire. Which really isn’t what people want to think so nobody really talks about it. But it’s true.”

There is more in this vein in the write up accompanying the beer posted by brewer Dan Paquette on the brewery's blog:

"Is Stingo the original Flanders Red? I’ve been all around the Rodenbach brewery and I’ve seen photos of plenty of wooden fermenters in old English breweries. There are a lot of similarities between breweries in this period anyway. De Dolle Brouwerij in Esen, Belgium is like a close cousin to the T & R Theakston brewery in Masham, Yorkshire. Green King still uses “rounds”, wooden vessels similar to the classic Belgian “foeder” to make its Olde Suffolk ale. I don’t claim to be making an academic study, just observations. But I’d love for someone to look into it further."

I remembered that the name "Stingo" showed up in the "Barley Wine and Old Ale" chapter of Amber, Gold, and Black, but on rereading the chapter I could find no particular mention of any acidity:

"Other regional varieties of strong ale included Yorkshire Stingo, which Alfred Barnard in 1890 found being brewed by John Metcalfe & Son at the Nidderdale brewery in Pately Bridge, and Joshua Tetley in Leeds, where he found it `very luscious, full of body and well flavoured without being heady'."

Later in the chapter there is this:

"Hammonds also brewed a stronger XXXXX Stingo, using 82 per cent pale malt and 18 per cent glucose, with the wort boiled for three hours to concentrate it and give it more colour, an OF of around 1100 and an abv of 9.5.  The quite high final gravity of 1027, suggesting a sweet beer, would have been balanced by the massive amount of hops used, which may have given a bitterness level as high as 119.  This, Dr Thomas suggests, was a classic barley wine, with an aftertaste that was likely to be richly hoppy and bitter, and an ester and alcoholic  background from the high gravity fermentation.  As he says: 'One can only speculate on its complexity'." 

I suspect the idea that a beer called "Stingo" was the missing link between Flanders and English ales is probably wishful thinking. But regardless of any such particular link, there are definite ties between the two traditions.  Here is what Jeff Sparrow has to say in Wild Brews on the related topic of blending old and young beers:

"It is difficult to determine exactly on which side of the English Channel this tradition began.  The people at the classic West Flanders brewery Rodenbach cite the similarity with the practice of blending in the United Kingdom, and ancestor Eugene Rodenbach was known to have studied brewing in England.  Some people credit Rodenbach with bringing the method of tall wooden cask construction and accompanying fermentation process to Belgium around 1860. Says Michael Jackson, "Some people believe that Rodenbach's techniques of aging and blending were taken from the porter and stout brewers of England and Ireland.  I think it was initially the Flemish who taught the islanders about such matters, although knowledge did begin to flow the other way after the Industrial Revolution." Wherever the tradition began, the English and Flemish traditions are inexorably linked."

What is clear is that English stock ales were often prized for their tart, vinous character, something they share to some extent with Flanders beers, and something that was almost certainly the product of a secondary fermentation by brettanomyces and other organisms.  You can read some interesting speculation about exactly how tart the beers were in the comments from this post at Shut Up About Berkeley Perkins.  Reading through some of the historical material that Ron and others have posted you find plenty of references to acidity and "hardness" being undesirable, so perhaps these weren't beers that were soured to the same extent as modern Flanders reds etc.  Then again, with no way of trying the beers in question, its difficult to know exactly how these brewers applied such terms.  Perhaps what they sought to avoid was the vinegary acidity that is produced by acetobacter, rather than the softer acidity from lactic fermentation?

Sadly there aren't many surviving British beers in this tradition. Samuel Smiths still makes a Yorkshire Stingo, but as far as I know it does not undergo secondary brettanomyces fermentation.  The closest thing I know is Gale's Prize Old Ale.  When it was brewed by Gale's of Horndean, it underwent secondary fermentation in wooden hogsheads inhabited by various wild yeasts and lactic acid producing bacteria.  After Fuller's took over the beer, they preserved its resident microflora by brewing in a solera-style system, preserving a portion of each batch to inoculate future ones (kind of like I've been doing with my beers).  (Another example is Greene King Old XXXXX, which makes up a portion of their Olde Suffolk Ale.)

The Zymurgy recipe makes no claims to historical accuracy, but I decided to follow it anyway.  Besides the anachronous use of crystal and huskless black malt, the hopping rates seem very low compared to the recipes for keeping beers that you can find on Ron's website.  Still, it looked like it would make a good beer, so last weekend I went ahead and brewed something based on it.

I made a couple of changes to the recipe written in the magazine.  The first was to replace their single base malt (Maris Otter) with a blend of the malts I have on hand: I went with Mild malt, Pearl, and US 2-row.  The Zymurgy recipe called for adding a finely ground huskless black malt just before mash-out to darken the colour without adding too much roast; since I didn't have any on hand, I cold-steeped some roasted barley overnight, and added the resulting liquid for the last ten minutes of the boil.  The recipe also calls for a dark invert sugar.  Since it takes a while to make this from scratch on the stove, I tried the method of blending a white invert with dark blackstrap molasses (described here).  It gave a nice licorice characters to the final sugar, and was much easier than trying to hold the sugar at the right temperature for a few hours to darken it.  I think I'll be using this method from now on.

Brew day went fairly smoothly.  I've noticed that my efficiency takes a real dip when I go above 1.060, and even after lowering predicted efficiency a bit in BeerSmith for this recipe I still came ten points short, ending with a beer at 1.080 rather than 1.090.  I pitched a large amount of Wyeast 1469 cropped from the two beers I brewed last weekend, and set my fermentation chamber in the low 60s.  The recipe calls for starting higher to encourage ester formation, but I stuck with my usual practice, which involves gradually ramping up the temperature over the next week.  I haven't decided exactly how I'm going to inoculate this beer yet.  It will certainly get a pitch of White Labs Brettanomyces Clausenii, as will the Keeping Porter I brewed last week.  I also reserved some of the Oud Bruin I brewed recently, which has lactobacillus brevis in it, and I'm thinking about adding this to both beers.  With the alcohol levels and hopping rates as high as they are, I'd be suprised if the lactobacillus manages to make any real contribution, but I figured I might as well try.  The real question is whether to add cultures that I know contain pediococcus, or whether to stick with brettanomyces and lactobacillus.  The latter will certainly result in a less sour beer, which in this case may be what I want.

Recipe:

   

Estimated O.G.	1.090
Measured O.G.	1.080
Measured F.G.
ABV.
Mash:
	152°F	90 minutes
Malt:
40.8% Mild Malt
25.4% 2-Row
16.9% Pearl 10.3% Invert #3 2.6% Dark Crystal I 2.6% Dark Crystal II 1.7% Roasted Barley	(Cold Steeped)
Hops:
EKG	60	24.6 IBUs	(20g @ 6.5%)
EKG	20	3.5 IBUs	(20g @ 6.0%)
Yeast:
Wyeast 1469