It’s sour time again! This type of beer has a long turnaround time, so I’m trying to get a lage pipeline going this winter. Hopefully next year I can start having somewhat regular releases of finished sours.
This batch is inspired by Sapwood Cellars Upper Bound: Apricot. It was the first first apricot sour I ever tried, and I thought it was fantastic. One of my favorite releases from them so far.
The base beer for this batch will be a straightforward pale sour recipe. To that, I’ll add apricots in two stages. First dry apricots just after primary fermentation. Then when the beer is closer to being finished I plan to further age half of it (or maybe all of it) on some fresh local apricots.
I know sapwood used apricot puree for their version, but I’ve read that puree is a real pain to separate from the beer, often resulting in large losses at packaging time.
I’ve read very positive accounts about using dry apricots. I’m curious to see what they have to offer on their own. And of course fresh apricots should work well. I plan to get them from a local farm when they are in season this summer.
I got the idea to add fruit in stages, first dry, then fresh, from Mike Tonsmiere’s Cherry Wine. I just started a batch of that recipe as well.
Recipe
This base recipe is adapted from the “Sour American” recipe on page 326 of American Sour Beer.
A note on dry apricots: I sampled organic unsulphured dry apricots from two local sources, Whole Foods and a local natural market. I was surprised how different the two were. The Whole Foods apricots tasted dramatically better. I’d recommend trying to taste multiple options when sourcing dry fruit. They definitely aren’t all the same.
Batch size: 5.5 gallons
Target OG: 1.058
Target FG: 1.006
Calculated IBU: 12.5
Calculated SRM: 4.0
Grain bill:
7.5 lb Pilsner (62.5%)
3.0 lb Maris Otter (25.0%)
1.0 lb Wheat Malt (8.3%)
0.5 lb Flaked Oats (4.2%)
Mash (Batch Sparge): 154 °F @ 1.4 qts/lb
Hops:
0.7 oz Wilamette @ 60 minutes
Yeast:
ECY01 Bug Farm harvested from one of my recent solera batches
Secondary Additions:
0.5 lb/gal organic unsulphured dry apricots
immediately after primary.
1.25 lb/gal fresh apricots once gravity is stable
0.25 oz/gal french oak cubes boiled 5 min before adding
Notes
2020-02-16 - Brew day. Got about 6 gallons of wort at 1.057. Fermenting at ambient temp (mid 60’s).
2020-03-11 - Transferred the whole batch into a 6 gallon PET carboy with 3lb of unsulphured dried apricots that I cut in half. I tasted two different sources and one was noticeably more flavorful than the other. (Whole Foods was better than David’s Market).
Current gravity 1.010. It’s not tasting too interesting yet. Just a young, lightly tart, saison-ey kinda thing going on now.
2020-04-05 - Apricots are stll floating. Took a gravity reading and topped up the last bit of head space (about a quart) with some of my Berliner Weisse. Gravity 1.011. I guess the bugs are still working on the sugar from the dry fruit.
It’s already smelling and tasting pretty strongly of apricots. Promising!
2020-05-12 - Fruit is still floating. The surface is starting to develop a thin white pellicle. Doesn’t look like mold. I think it’s ok. I may still rack to a new vessel soon anyway. The fruit has probably given up most of what it had to offer by now.
2020-07-11 - Most of the fruit is on the bottom now but a little bit still floating. Transferred off of the fruit and into 5 gallon carboy. Filled it almost exactly.
It’s really sour! Whoa. Might need to blend it down with something else. I’m going to hold onto some recently finished pale saison to blend with.
Gravity is 1.010. Will check gravity again in September.
2020-09-09 - Still good! The dry apricots are very apparent. Really nice aroma. Good flavor. Gravity still 1.010. Seems a little suspicious.. Could it be time to add the fresh fruit? Check again 11/09. Add fruit/oak then if stable.
The frozen fruit from July still looked nice, and it smelled really good when I opened it. Transferred onto all 8 pounds of local apricots I froze earlier in the summer for this purpose. Also added roughly a quart of white wine saison, just to slightly turn down the sourness and fill the head space.
This is tasting fantastic. I really hope the quality holds up through bottling.
2021-01-16 - I was going to bottle today. Gravity 1.006. I didn’t account for the saison/fruit changing the gravity when I was planning this. I’m not sure whether it’s safe to bottle now. I’m pretty sure the change is just from the fruit addition but I’m going to give it a month and check again.
2021-01-17 - Added another 0.3oz french oak cubes boiled 5 min and about 8oz saison to top up to the neck. I thought the last gravity sample could use a little more oak and it was still quite sour so a little more saison to temper that wouldn’t hurt. Might as well use this unplanned delay to improve the beer a bit.
2021-02-13 - Bottled! It was tricky to rack off the fruit. A mesh bag over the siphon worked pretty well, and I ended up just accepting a bit of loss. I got about 5.2 gallons into the bottling bucket.
Primed to 2.6 vol, calculated assuming a normal amount of residual CO2 since it re-fermented pretty recently with the fresh fruit. Got 52 12oz bottles.
Tasting notes at bottling: Strongly sour but tempered enough to be able to enjoy a full glass. I would’ve blended in more dry saison if I had any on hand, but I’m happy as is.
Apricots are front and center in both aroma and flavor. No subtlety here. Though that’s appropriate since the description of the original Sapwood beer included the phrase “subtlety be damned!”
I get a little vanilla from the oak but overall the oakyness is less prominent than expected. There was a lot of oak in there, I think it’s just getting drowned out by the fruit.
2021-03-22 - Opened a bottle to test carbonation. It’s basically flat. I hope it just needs some more time.
2021-04-27 - Another carbonation check. Still flat… Tasty though. It’s very sour
2021-05-02 - Small carbonation test. Moving a 6 pack somewhere warmer. Two bottles left alone, two shaken vigorously to rouse the yeast, two I opened an added an extra 1.4g of sucrose (~1 vol CO2) then shook. Will check at around 4 and 8 weeks to see if any change
2021-08-29 - No change in the shaken bottles. The bottles with 1.4g sugar added have some carbonation but it’s still lacking.
New experiment, 12 bottles: I’m going to try adding 1.5 g sucrose plus a drop of fresh yeast to each bottle.
I’m getting a little tired of how sour this is. I tried mixing a sample with 1.5 g/l potassium bicarbonate in the glass. It wasn’t a huge change, but it made it a little more balanced. I didn’t detect any off flavors from the bicarb, so I’m going to add some of that when I reopen the bottles to add the sugar/yeast. 0.56 g / bottle ~= 1.5 g/L
2021-09-23 - First taste of the modified bottles. Finally some carbonation! Maybe the fresh yeast was the key.
I’m pretty happy with the results here. I get a bit of an undesirable aftertatse way after sipping. Might be the potassium bicarbonate, not sure. Overall though, very enjoyable. I think I’ll dose some bottles with just sugar and yeast and do a comparison around Halloween.
Changes for next time
Pale beer + apricot is my favorite beer/fruit combination right now, but I think I want a little more nuance next time I make one. I’d like to tone down the sourness and fruit a bit, and have a bit more Brett and oak/barrel character. I’m thinking along the lines of a tart saison with apricots.
Now that I know how great the flavor contribution from quality dried apricots is, I think I’ll probably just use dry fruit in my next apricot beer. The fresh apricots were tasty, but a lot of hassle to acquire. For a noticeable but nuanced level of fruit I think I’ll try around 0.20 - 0.25 lb/gal dry fruit.