Double sour brew day!
I’m still very new to sour beer brewing. Rather than going off and experimenting right away, I want to start with some proven recipes. Today I’m starting a couple of beers inspired by my favorite sours to come out of Sapwood Cellars to date.
First up, Opulence, a sour red that has two separate cherry additions. Aged in a mix of red wine and bourbon barrels, dry sour cherries were added early in the aging process, and then before bottling it was finished on fresh sour cherries.
Before trying it I was a little skeptical of combination of bourbon bourbon aging a sour beer, but the vanilla character of the barrels worked really nicely with the cherries.
Opulence is an evolution of Mike Tonsmiere’s homebrewed Cherry Wine. The main difference between the two is that Opulence was barrel aged, but Cherry Wine had no oak. Also, Opulence is 100% sour cherries, where Cherry Wine was a mix of sour and sweet cherries.
Mike and Scott made a detailed youtube video comparing Cherry Wine and Opulence, and discussing how both were made.
Recipe
I’m sticking pretty close to the original cherry wine grain bill. I had to sub out a couple of the specialty grains, and I’m using some crystal instead of the aged lambic hops.
Update: I accidentally doubled the dry cherries of the original recipe. I’ll add the intended amount of fresh fruit or maybe a bit less depending how it tastes when I get to that point.
Batch size: 5.75 gallons
Target OG: 1.064
Target FG: 1.005
Calculated IBU: 10
Calculated SRM: 14.9
Grain bill:
5 lb Muinich (37.0%)
5 lb Vienna (37.0%)
2 lb US 2-Row (14.9%)
1 lb Caravienne (7.4%)
0.5 lb Special B (3.7%)
Mash (Batch Sparge): 158 °F @ 1.4 qts/lb
Hops:
0.9 oz Crystal @ 60 minutes
Yeast:
A blend of ECY01 Bug Farm and ECY20 Bug County harvested from my recent solera batches
Fruit:
2lb organic dry oil-free cherries (~1/3 lb per gallon)
TBD fresh local sour cherries
Notes
2020-02-16 - Brew day. Followed mash calculator, came in 2* hot. added some ice. a little too much. mashed at ~156. should be fine.
Ended up with about 5.75G @ 1.064. fermenting at ambient temp (mid 60’s) in spare bedroom in HDPE bucket
2020-03-11 - Gravity 1.011. Transferred onto 2lb organic dry sour cherries (no oil on the cherries).
2020-03-20 - Cherries are floating on top. Stirred them a bit to hopefully keep them from getting moldy. This is my first time using dry fruit in beer. Not sure how much I need to worry about this. I’m debating if I should top up the carboy with some of the ~2.5G of leftover solera beer that I have sitting around.
2020-04-05 - I pulled a gravity sample of this and then racked some of my backup solera beer onto it. Probably half a gallon. Gravity is at 1.009.
Tasting kinda boring. Not much sourness yet. I’m surprised there isn’t more cherry flavor.
The beer is still very young though. Can’t judge it yet.
2020-05-12 - Cherries still floating. Punching them down periodically
2020-05-31 - A spotty white pellicle has started forming over the fruit and it’s making me nervous. Pretty sure it’s not mold, but I transferred the beer off of the cherries into a 5 gallon carboy just to be safe. The cherries should’ve given up most of their flavor by now anyway.
The original 6 gallon carboy filled to the neck + 2lb dry cherries yielded almost exactly 5 gallons when transferred off the fruit.
Gravity is down a bit, 1.008. Flavor and aroma are much improved from ~2 months ago. Moderately sour now, nice cherry flavor. I like the direction this is going.
2020-09-09 - Gravity still 1.008. It’s taken on an unpleasant chemical aroma. Nail polish remover? It’s off-putting. Very disappointing. I’ll check it again in February. Might be a dumper.
This is the first taste since I racked it off the fruit. I wonder if I introduced some oxygen when I transferred? I’m pretty confident that it’s been well sealed since then. It did have one of the solid stoppers though. I’ve got universal stoppers in the rest of the carboys. Maybe ditch the solid stoppers in the future to be safe.
2021-04-25 - Pulled a small sample to see if this did anything in the last ~8 months. I was expecting to just confirm that I wanted to dump it, but it’s actually tasting pretty good now. Quite the turn around!
2021-05-02 - Bottled half of this straight (dry cherries only), transferred the other half on 0.5lb/gal whole frozen montmorency cherries. It’s already pretty sour so I went light on the cherries to try to keep it balanced.
Primed to 2.8 vol assuming a normal amount of residual CO2, so actual carbonation will probably be lower. I’m still having trouble estimating priming sugar needs for aged beers.
2021-06-26 - Bottled the half with fresh cherries. Got a bit more volume than expected. I think the priming sugar ended up at about 2.3 vols CO2. A sample tasted pretty good. I’m optimistic for this batch turning out well after all.
Changes for next time
TBD