Sour Beer

[sockmerchant]

I have been on a huge sour beer kick as of late. Especially flanders red and oud bruin. Lambic's can be a bit more hit and miss for me.

A few questions

Are any (commercial) brewers in NZ venturing into there territories as yet? It would be awesome to see an NZ take on the these beers. They are a giant pain in the bum to brews though, so i wouldnt be surprised if no one has.

Does anyone on here do these? I have started a couple recently, but clearly it will take some time before i know if i did a good job. Would be awesome to do some bottle swaps in the future. 

Assuming someone has brewed some flanders style sours, have you used WLP665 Flemish Ale Blend? Impressions? How does it compare to wyeast Roesalari blend?

Cheers 

[sockmerchant]

The mad fermentationalist is my guru :)

Read through wild brews a few times too

Also recommend the embrace the funk blog

[Hillman]

8 Wired bottled that grand cru. He posted a pic on twitter but I don't think it's in the shops yet. For locally available but not NZ sours, Thorndon New World has Green Flashed Rayon Vert at the moment which is very sour and really good. Not selling like hotcakes apparently. I also got a bottle of Russian River/Sierra Nevada Brux from there which is 100% brett. Looking forward to cracking that open.

Brett does sour, it just takes a long time. A friend of mine had an ale fermenting with brett for two years before he bottled it. It was nice and sour but he probably left it a bit long as it went through a phase of smelling like sour cherry pie that didn't end up in the bottle. I'm currently souring a saison with brett. Brewed it in november and planning to bottle in October.

[Greig McGill]

I never found Rayon Vert sour. Perhaps I need to try it again? Bretty and tart? Yes. Delicious? Certainly. Sour? Not so much.

[Damon Colbert]

Sounds like I need to get my hands on some of these brews.  Greig; perhaps the difference between tart and sour is subjective?  From what I've read, the balance of lactic and acetic acid determines the perception of 'sour' versus 'tart'.  But I imagine different people perceive sour to different degrees, or at least describe it differently?

About souring your saison; I was thinking of doing the same thing myself.  Only after reading wild brews, I began to doubt how much effect it would have.  Most sour styles have a degree of 'unfermentables' left behind for Brett and/or bacteria to chew away on, but saison is characteristically quite dry. Wouldn't have thought there would be enough to go sour on?  Or is that perhaps a good thing, limiting the capacity for souring?

[sockmerchant]

Yeah, I think we are talking about different stuff. Brett can create small amounts of acetic acid. But if someone is getting very sour beer over a long time, I think that something else got in there too.

Damon, I've been reading up a lot on Brett lately. Turns out that brett can have a major impact on the taste and aroma without actually fermenting. So without dropping the gravity even one point. In fact a lot of the brett character seems to only gets developed when fermentation is completed. I think there is a lot more research that has to be done. From what i've read though, the brett can actually take alcohol and change it back to the stuff it needs to keep going, and then re-ferment this back to alcohol... crazy stuff like that.

So, while the bugs do need stuff to chew one, it doesnt seem like brett does.

I had some PET bottles with a tripel i brewed a year and a bit ago. I believed the the tripel to be a complete failure and was going to dump it. I ended up bottling it, but ran out of glass. I did a crappy job of cleaning some previously used PET bottles that had been lying around for a long time. Every single PET bottle got MAJOR brett. It didnt taste terrible...in small quantities. but huge farmyyard, horseass or whaterver you wish to call it. (The glass bottles had no brett and ended up really tasty after many months) That trippel finished at 1.006...down from 1.08something. The PET bottles were only slightly more carbonated. I was curious and took a hydro. Was at 1.004 to 1.005. I was surprised that such a small drop created that much horse :)

On a side note, I ended up blending some of that with a belgian brown ale i did. Was freaking delicious, and started me on this sour/wild beer road :) 

[Dougal]

From, what I've read, pitching a small amount of Brett and not oxygenating can give you greater Brett character. People report 100% Brett beers can end up with quite a clean profile without so much barnyard. Though, as you say it could have to do with the Brett re-procesing esters and other compounds to make the funky flavours.

[sockmerchant]

I am fairly new to brett etc but yeah they are a different beast for sure. I recently heard a conversation (i think involving either the crooked stave brewer or tomme arthur) saying that if a beer is 100% fermented using brett, that even in the medium term the brett will just hang out and not contribute as much "farmyard" character as you would traditionally expect. But when used  after primary fermentation or for bottling, you do get that. No idea why.

Mr brewshop will be getting me some brett troi and brett c in the next few weeks. I will be doing some 100% brett saisons.

[Damon Colbert]

Brett does do sour, and only over a long time period. And in very small quantities.  As you imply, higher levels of acidity require Lactobacilllus and/or Pediococcus, which ferment in the medium-term. But these would require a decent amount of unconverted starch or dextrins to grow on

In a long-term ferment (upwards of a few months), there will be little/no sugars left for Brett to metabolize.  In that instance they will seek alternate carbon sources, potentially alcohol, but more likely the autolysis products of expired Saccharomyces. Metabolism of alcohol as a carbon source, and converting it back to alcohol would be redundant, the yeast would gain no energy input from that.  More likely is a conversion to acetic acid, which would yield the microbe some (albeit not much) energy.  They are fermenting, just not very quickly.

Hence, why I wondered how much souring would occur in a characteristically dry saison.  I guess addition of Brett late in fermentation, is more for the purpose of obtaining barnyard/funk character.

As you chaps allude to in subsequent comments, it seems the rate of fermentation affects the outcome of Brett fermentation.  Well oxygenated, highly-dosed wort will ferment out relatively cleanly like a Saccharomyces wort would.  Put the yeast under strain, oxygen depletion etc., and it will need to resort to less efficient metabolic processes, which will produce the energy they require, but also as a side-effect produce various esters. 

[sockmerchant]

My microbiology understandings are... limited.

However i did find this "The overall level of higher alcohols was strikingly low, as Boulton and Quain (2006 p.118) reported 100-200 mg/l was normally found in beer. Quain and Duffield (1985) proposed that higher alcohols were metabolized as cellular redox control helping to restore the NAD+ to NADH ratio"

http://www.brettanomycesproject.com/

So they do metabolize alcohol. just not in the way I stated above

[Jonathan Matthews]

Just my two cents and certainly not scientific at all.
I've had really good success with Brett in the past and really like it in certain beers.
But last year i split a batch of saison and added brett.b to one half after primary fermentation. The straight saison was really good but the saison with brett seemed like it had had all its flavour stripped from it and tasted very thin and lifeless.

[Hillman]

I'm going to brew the saison again this weekend and eventually add part of the new batch to the fermenter with the brett in it. Perhaps I could add it before fermentation is complete to make some more sugars available. I don't know what I'm trying to achieve though other than hopefully a delicious beer.

As for the Rayon Vert I just opened another one and it's definitely sour. The barnyard funk is blended with the acidity that lingers on in the mouth. Perhaps our palates identify those flavours differently or the brett has continued to act in the bottles.

[Greig McGill]

Right, looks like I need to try some more Rayon Vert. Oh no, what a chore. ;)