re: Homebrewing: In-Process Thread

Brewed my coffee vanilla porter again on Saturday and it was fermenting like crazy on Sunday. Had beer coming out the blowoff tube. Probably lost half a gallon, but fortunately all was contained, so no mess to clean up.

Just tried my WLP677 lacto starter and it's super sour with no crazy off flavors.

Looks like I'll be mashing and kettle souring a Berliner Weiss tomorrow.

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Rebrewing the Porter we used for Iron Brewer, probably to use for Zapp's.

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Yep, I really like that one. May have been the real actual tiramasu bribe but I don't know.

I posted it in the FBD thread yesterday, but i cracked open my French Benefits - French Saison yesterday. It's really good. My goal was to make a saison similar to sofie, but use as many french ingredients as possible, thus the name, French Benefits. I used French Saison yeast and French Oak to age.
This beer smells terrific. Perfect carbonation. As i said yesterday, it could taste a little "brighter" but as it warms, it brightens up. I think the oak, while virtually imperceptible in the beer, may have subdued some of the citrus notes i intended. It does have some good earthy/spicy notes. I though the grapefruit peel would lend more citrus notes, but i believe the small quantity (.5 oz) prevented that from happening.

Overall, it's a great beer, just not 100% exactly what i was going for. More like 95%. However, a little more time may allow it to waken up a bit. Again, this was bottle 1 @ 2 weeks of conditioning.

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I even got a new brew kettle for Christmas that is still sitting unused.

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I'll pick it up and break it in for you! Apparently there is a good bit of work floating around, one the firms my wife used to work at is slammed now to.

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Apparently there is a good bit of work floating around, one the firms my wife used to work at is slammed now to.

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It beats the last 4 years of no work, but working is highly over rated.

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French Benefits - French Saison

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Glad it came out tasty. That oak does add a little smoothness that is otherwise absent from a lot of saisons. Give it a little time. I know it's already bottled up, but you can try an experiment of adding a little gypsum to a glass of it and seeing if that helps it pop some. I do that a good bit on beers before I keg. I'll wait and see how it's aging, and then add some gypsum if it needs that little boost.

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Close to 4 months without brewing for me

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Tell your clients to give you an afternoon off.

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I've been using my FermWrap this week to help keep my temp around 110F while kettle souring a Berliner Weisse

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Hmm. Now I'm interested in a fermwrap. Never thought about it for a berliner weisse.

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I'm on day 2 and sourness is just starting to show up in the wort. Kind of weird to see a krausen in your boil kettle.

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Obviously you know that things can get of hand with the quickness once it starts souring. I typically boil pretty soon after 48 hours. I've used both a lacto starter and the crushed grain method, both produced nice but different results.

I've never done a BW but have used this method to sour saisons and a Baltic porter.

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I figure worst case scenario, if it gets too sour, I'll brew a low gravity wheat and blend them.

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I'm thinking about doing that with my 100% Brett Baltic porter. The tartness really got kicked up by the blackberries and I don't have the volume that I was aiming for. I might brew a 2 gallon batch of porter to blend with this to get me closer to 6 gallons at bottling and tone down the tartness. However, I love the tartness but it might be too much for others