Makin' Lamic (Part 2)

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.