This Beer is a Pipe Bomb: Sour Beers

Belgian wheat (DeDolle)

Brettanomyces lambicus Wyeast

Brettanomyces sp. Rodenbach Foederbier

RF1 Rodenbach Foederbier

Pediococcus sp. Rodenbach Foederbier

Brettanomyces sp. Ongefilterd Palm

Brettanomyces sp. New Belgium La Folie

LF1 New Belgium La Folie

LF2 New Belgium La Folie

Lactobacillus delbrueckii Wyeast

ah AlB's famed Rodenbug Blend. A mixture of yeast and bacteria from the highest pedigree; blended in a ratio perfect for sour flanders type beers.

about 20mins after pulling it out of the fridge

Waiting on a list and repaying AlB in sour beers seems to be the norm. So I'm feeling very grateful, as well as a little guilty, for having brewed 2 beers from Sean's original pitch of this blend.

The first beer brewed was a Flanders Red ale recipe straight from the back of Wild Brews ( a wonderful book by Jeff Sparrows). This was also the second collaboration brew between myself and Sean. The brew day went down with out a hitch, except for us forgetting to add the tritcale until 70 minutes into the mash. All in all it was no big deal, it converted, and even if it didnt the bugs would eat through that starch like a pack of starvin' Irishmen.

The recipe is as follows:

Flanders Red. Brewed on 1/30/10

Recipe is for 12.9 gallons pre-boil, 11.7 gallons post-boil, all grain

O.G. 1.060 IBU's 16

12.25 lb. Vienna Malt

5 lb. Flaked Triticale

2 lb. Aromatic malt

2 lb. Caravienne

1.5 lb. crystal 15

.75 lb. Special B

.5 lb. crystal 120

.5 lb. crystal 75

***

52 gr. Willamette whole 4.7% AA 60 min

Mash 7.5 gallons water with the following additions:

5 gr. chalk

1 gr. gyspum

2 gr. calcium chloride

2 gr. baking soda

Mash in to 156

Forgot to put in the triticale! Put in at 20 minutes, dropping the temp to 148.

Pulled .75 gallons of mash liquor and heated to boiling, adding back to mash.

This raised temp back to 158

Total mash time 75 minutes

Sparge with 8.5 gallons at 170

Collect 12.9 gallons at 1.054 = 81% efficiency

Boil 60 minutes

yeast nutrient at 10 minutes

Chilled to 70, aerated by shaking for 2 minutes

pitched a slurry of AlB's Rodenbug blend / cali ale yeast

Fermented in the mid 60's for about 3 weeks, then racked to secondary for aging. Gravity was at 1.020.

*** damn you Sean! and your non percentaging self

After racking this beer into a corny keg for bulk storage, Sean was kind enough to let me keep a small pitch of the now 3rd generation rodenbug pitch. Into the fridge went the yeast and off to vacation I went; now 1 month later Ive finally gotten around to brewing a beer with my pitch.

Over vacation, Quinn and I did some brainstorming over what we wanted our sour beer to be. I knew that I wanted this one to be different from the other sours I've done by having a malt complexity in the finished product. Quinn wanted a sour beer that would get a fair amount of it's sourness from malic or citric acid a la Consecration or even more recently Supplication. After toying around with making a biscuit bomb as a base beer, I reconsidered and settled on making Tomme Arthur's Lost and Found Dubbel as our target base beer. If you have never had this beer, it could best be described as over the top: a blend of many very flavorful malts that that coalesce into a bready raisiny/plummy whole. Anyways, I thought this over-the-top base would still shine through a bit after being soured. *
This summer, Quinn and I hope to source some fruit to freeze or use immediately in this brew. I'm thinking raspberries or possibly cherries. (Quinn's coworker's grandpa own a cherry farm: "Quinn see if we can get schaarbeek cherries!")

* Interestingly the percentages for Lost Abbey's double (sans sugar) match up pretty close to the Wild Brew's recipe for Cuvee de Tomme.

Anyways the recipe is as follows: