Constant readers of this blog (both of you) will know that
I’m a little obsessed lately with sour beer.
Why? What’s the
appeal of beer that’s been intentionally turned bad?
I don’t know, to be honest. No the other hand, ask
your average homebrewer why he wants to brew something topping off at 100 IBUs.
(IBU, for you non-homebrewers out there, is a standard
measure of beer bitterness. It stands
for International Bittering Unit, and it’s calculated by measuring the type and
amount of hops in beer, how long the hops are boiled for, the conversion rate
of the alpha acids in the hops, and a bunch of other stuff you don’t care
about. Put it this way: more hops=higher
IBUs=bitter beer.)
Homebrewers, perhaps because commercial brewers were for a
long time reluctant to make bitter brews, love highly hopped beer. Which explains why there are so many homebrew
variations on the IPA, a traditionally bitter type of beer.
I am not a fan. So
instead, I guess in a kind of almost teenage-like rebellion, I went the other
way, and embraced the sour brews. Now, I
can’t stop.
About a year ago, I wrote here about my attempt to create a homebrewed lambic. I said it would have
to age for at least a year before I could do anything with it.
Well, the year is pretty much up.
Time to bottle?
Not on your life. But
it is time to sample, and the sample tastes amazing! Perfect acidic bite, perfect weirdly “off”
flavor. Excellent, but not done yet.
Instead, I brewed ANOTHER batch. Originally, I was just going to brew a 1
gallon mini batch, but that seemed a terrible waste of yeast and bacteria, so I
scaled it up to a full 5 gallons.
After a little more than a week of primary fermentation,
producing a suitably horrible-tasting very young lambic, I racked off 1 gallon,
which I poured into the aforementioned aging lambic. Then, I racked the remaining new lambic onto
cherry puree, which will eventually result in a sour cherry lambic, known as a
kriek.
Now what?
Now, I wait. Lambics,
as I’ve said before, take a lot of patience.
Some months down the road, I will bottle these two batches,
and let them age more.
In general, time is the enemy of beer. That’s one of the great things about
homebrewing; the beer is fresh, in a way that beer from almost anywhere else
isn’t. Beer tends to lose flavor as it
ages, and the other flavors it develops tend to not be very good, resulting in
skunky, stale, or at least very bland beers.
There are some exceptions.
Every time I bottle a batch of beer, I put a couple bottles aside, partly to give me a quick visual record of my brewing, and partly so I can revisit certain beers, if the fancy should strike me.
And recently, I was struck by just such a fancy, grabbing
two beers that were more than 2 years old.
One, a doppelbock, had matured beautifully, and tasted much better than
I remembered. The second, a spiced
Christmas ale, did not fare so well. I
drank it, but found the experience wholly unsatisfying.
The stronger the beer (from an alcohol point of view), the
better it seems to hold up to aging. And
considering the glorious alchemy that occurs in a whiskey barrel as that harsh
liquor ages, that makes perfect sense. However, the specific chemical reactions the go in the bottle (or in the carboy in my case) involve the complex reactions of various chemicals, oxidation rates, temperature, and the whole process is pretty poorly understood. Poorly understood by me, anyway.
But from my experience, the doppelbock, at 8% abv, was a perfect candidate for
aging (which makes me regret drinking all the rest within the first
month). Stronger beers, like barleywines
and Belgian Trappist ales (both of which I’m planning on brewing this year) are
also perfect candidates for long-term aging.
And so are sour beers, regardless of strength. After all, one of the great dangers of
letting beer (especially unfiltered homebrew) sit too long is that it might
turn sour. Sour beers can’t turn sour. And they can’t lose their hoppy bitterness
(you can lose something you don’t have).
The kriek I’m making will probably start to lose its cherry taste, but
that’s by design. The cherry taste is
supposed to slip into the background, providing just enough fruit taste to
balance the sour tang.
So wait, I hear you say, you’re brewing 10 gallons of sour
beer, and are planning 5 gallon batches of two high-alcohol beers that will
require extended aging…so what are you going to drink in the meantime?
What do you mean? That's just two bottles.... |
It’s a fair question.
But brewing requires patience. And
sometimes this homebrewer even
demonstrates the necessary level of
patience. But not often.
After all, how will I know when the beer is ready, unless
I’m constantly taste-testing?
Yes, it’s a burden, but somehow, I’ll survive.