Flanders Red part 1

A Belgian style sour is launched

This is an all-grain kit from GetErBrewed aiming at a Belgian lambic sour beer. You won’t want to try brewing a beer like this unless you know that you like that style. I usually taste these sort of beers at (micro)pubs where you can get a pint of cask and a crafty third. The third of a pint of craft beer will include off-piste beers like sours and lambics (as well as imperial stouts DIPA DDH IPAs etc) and other, generally higher-alcochol beers that you probably don’t want to risk a pint of. Having established that I do like the style, off we go.

The grain is pre-mixed in one 8.3kg bag - just about the largest grain bill I’ve done so far. The mash/sparge water calculator on the Grainfather app on the iPhone had been rendered useless by an enforced “upgrade” so I had to guess the amounts.

It transpires that I got it well wrong. This affects the efficiency of extracting sugars from the grain and I ended up with less gravity than predicted. Not too worried though.

Anyone that knows me will know that over the years I have come to hate software upgrades on whatever platform. 99% of the time they make things worse, slower or both and even though I don’t want them they are forced on me. Worse - the software supplier is blissfully unaware that they have f#cked up and p*ssed off their customers. Always. Every time. Do they care? No. Do they fix things? Unlikely. Only this time I did raise a detailed complaint to Grainfather and they DID fix it. Took a week. Why didn’t they test it properly? Muppets. Anyway back to the beer…

OG was 1064 - should have been 1075

The yeast was a refrigerated liquid yeast pack called Roeselare from Wyeast containing 3 strains of yeasties, two of them sour. Roeselare is a place in Flanders.

I’d always thought that liquid yeasts started working faster than dried yeasts. Nope - this took 3 days to start… It says to leave it 18 months for the sour flavours to develop and it implies that the temperature could / should be allowed to vary over this time.

Rowlocks to that - let’s kick the Inkbird into action - I’ve had it ages and never used it in anger yet. As this will knock out a FV for 18 months I’m going to hide it away in an old hollowed-out fridge in the garage containing a heat pad and an Inkbird thermocouple. An Inkbird is a digital temperature controller with two mains socket outputs, one for the heater one for the fridge. The wires for the thermocouple and heater go thru the door seal and the door doesn’t shut too well. I may have to duck-tape it shut. High-tech, that’s me. :-)

So far the temperature control seems good, and the Bluetooth Tilt electronic hydrometer works from inside a metal box. So much for Faraday cages !

In Belgium they age these beers in oak and blend different-aged batches to get the right balance of taste. So I chucked some oak chips into the ferment to add some bogus authenticity. If it works well maybe I’ll do sequential brews and try the blending thing…. a bit ambitious maybe? I drink this stuff in thirds!

When the ferment appears to have finished I’ll extract the Tilt for use in other brews. It seems to have steadied at 1006 now making it a decent 7.6%

However there is a potential gotcha - Brettanomyces, one of the sour yeast strains, is notorious for “infecting” equipment. So the Tilt and the FV and future beers are at risk unless I can blitz them with something.

No bottle or beer pics yet - I will report back in 18 months….