Brettanomyces

I brewed a dark cherry lambic back in June and it's been aging in a carboy since. I'd only made one prior attempt at a lambic much earlier on in my brewing career, which I ended up dumping. Thankfully I've learned enough about yeast, bugs, and sanitation that I understand what I did wrong the first time around. This batch looks and smells like it's supposed to, although I haven't tasted it yet to be sure how it's coming along. I thought everything was good. I was wrong.

It seems like I either have brett lurking somewhere in my equipment or I have a natural source of wild yeast in my back yard or basement. Since then, I've had one batch I tossed because of contamination and traces of it show up elsewhere.

The first hint that something was up was a ten gallon batch of Firestone Double Barrel Ale clone which was split into two fermentors and pitched with two different yeasts. One of the batches turned out amazing, and the other was infected. The process for both was literally identical up to the point of pitching. The results couldn't have been more dissimilar. The aroma, taste, and even then color of the two beers was distinctly different.

So after a bit of research, I tossed all of my old plastic tubing, and brewed a batch of my ginger wheat which I fermented in a V-Vessel. (Separate post on that at some point.) I racked a gallon off into the sanitized, but possibly contaminated better bottle and let it sit for a couple of weeks. The test was inconclusive, and in hindsight I probably should've bottled up the results and done a "forced" conditioning at high temperatures to see if there really was anything at work.

But in any case, here are the steps I took / have taken since.

I bought a new better bottle and hardware for it.
I replaced all of my tubing and hoses used on the cold side of the process.
Instead of using a brush and mild detergent, I upgraded to PBW for cleaning the Better Bottle.
My keg cleaning regimen now involves a soak in PBW, scrubbing, a rinse and then a soak in star san instead of just a water rinse / scrub and a sanitizing cycle.
I've started buying fresh, clean bottles for anything which is going to need to age and only using recycled bottles for short term transportation.
As much as my limited space permits, I keep all of my aging beer cold.

After all that, I can't definitively say that I've beaten or contained that troublesome but wonderful bacteria lurking in my brewery somewhere, but I do brew with more confidence that I won't have to pitch any more batches soon.

Anything I missed?

The Evolution of a Beer Lover's Palate

Over the summer, we opened a new restaurant at my day job. After years of pushing for a better beer list, I finally met with a measure of success at this location. We held a couple of staff tastings with a certified cicerone to educate our servers and bartenders on what they were selling to our customers.

One of the things which jumped out at me was that the beers I liked the most got the most confused reactions from our staff. However, the cicerone had a nice nugget of wisdom: an appreciation for bitterness is the last thing to develop for most beer drinkers. I think that this is true, with one addition. Appreciation for bitterness is second to last, with an appreciation for sour beers being the last.

I personally started with the heavily fruited (Lindeman's being the most widely available here in Chicago) lambics, but tried a true gueze at some point a few years ago and appreciated how different it was. I've slowly been drinking more and more sour beers as of late and really growing to appreciate the complexity of something you have to slow down and sip. The old-world Belgian examples have a lot to offer, but there are some american breweries doing excellent work in this Genre. (Jolly Pumpkin is a Michigan-based small brewery who does exclusively sour, barrel-aged beers and happens to probably be my favorite thus far.)

There's even five gallons of sour cherry brett-fermenting lambic slowly aging away in a dark corner of my basement right now...

I was inspired to post this after reading this article.

Green Apple Lambic - 5

I think my suspicions were correct about the green apple lambic.

This past Friday was a brew day. Before moving on to the other tasks at hand (moving a Czech Pilsner to secondary - more on that later - and brewing a spiced winter ale) I sampled the lambic one last time.

It still had the scotch-like off flavor that was present about a month ago when moving it to secondary. (Boo.) Not to mention the fact that it looked like something was growing near the surface of the secondary after a week or so. I intended to take some pictures of it, but every time I moved the fermentor to get better light, it'd shake the crap off of the surface again...

So, ultimately I'm still a bit unsure that the batch was totally spoiled, but I guess it's better to be safe with this stuff.

Tack one up to catastrophic failure. I think that makes it Jordan 11 (or so) - beer 2.

Green Apple Lambic - 4

I moved the green apple lambic to secondary fermentation today. I can't say that I'm sure this batch is going to turn out well at all. I think that I may have left it on the yeast (primary) for too long - there are some pretty weird off-flavors that I caught when I tasted it today. (It had some good flavors, but an almost scotch-like note on the finish. Not so good.)

So, we'll see how it turns out after a month or so of conditioning. If it stays bad, this might be the first officially bad batch of homebrew I've made so far. (It's gotta happen at some point, right?)

Green Apple Lambic - 3

So, less than 24 hours after adding all of the green apple bits I could stuff into the fermentor, the fermenting beer managed to bubble up through the airlock. I guess green apples have plenty of fermentable sugars in 'em...

Green Apple Lambic - 2

It's now been about a week and a half since I started this batch. Despite some rather ominous warnings in Papazian's book about the sour mash process one uses to approximate the magical confluence of conditions in a few old Belgian breweries which produces real lambic, the wort didn't really stink all that badly or get moldy. (Which may very well mean that I did something wrong...)

However, I did add all of the green apples I could shove into the fermentor I'm using for this batch today. It kind of looks like beer sangria at this point. It'll be interesting to see how much of a secondary fermentation this kick starts.

In any case, this beer still has a long long way to go before it's even remotely drinkable. So I'll have to wait to share the outcome.

Green Apple Lambic

I was just up at my cousin's summer camp this past week to hang out for a few days after they shut down for the summer. Amongst other things, we cleaned out their cooler and pantry. I literally filled up the back seat of my Civic with a whole mess of commercially packaged foods, amongst which was an entire case of green apples.

Initially, I planned on making some hard cider. But once I realized that was probably out of the question because I don't own a cider press and I don't really feel like trying to extract juice from all of those apples with my brute strength, I changed my mind and decided to make a run at a green apple lambic. (For anyone who's tried Unibroue's Ephemere, you'll know exactly why that idea came to mind.)

So, I spent a bit of time researching the style and settled on a recipe that's mostly from Papazian's Joy of Homebrewing.

The brew is presently souring away while wrapped in a sleeping bag in my coat closet. I'm pretty interested to see exactly how disgusting the whole sour mash process actually is. (According to Papazian, the smell is supposedly bad enough to make you gag and want to pitch the brew...)