The last six months have been busy with weird beer brewing. I’m now six batches into brewing sours with no finished products yet!

Today I topped up and sampled a few of them.

Solera Barrel Flanders Red

My 15 gallon solera barrel has been sitting happily in my beer closet since I filled it with a young red sour about two months ago. The beer itself is about four months old now. Today I took a quick peek to see how the fill level was doing.

I was surprised to see the liquid level was down noticeably already. I wasn’t planning to top it up for a couple more months.

Back when I filled the barrel, I saved about 2.5 gallons of extra beer in a 3 gallon better bottle waiting to be used for top ups. I took a gravity sample from the backup beer, and then racked it into the barrel, filling all the way to the bung. I think it took about a 3 quarts. It looked like it was going to need more, but my estimate was off.

Back on with the airlock and hopefully no need to touch it again for a while. The sample I pulled is the beer on the right in the photo.

Gravity: 1.009

Appearance: Slightly cloudy, a deep red. Looking attractive overall.

Aroma: Not a whole lot going on in the aroma department. I actually think it has less aroma than when it started aging.

Flavor: This has a long way to go. It’s not offensive, just kind of boring. No sourness to speak of.

I wish I’d actually pulled my sample from the barrel. I’m curious how the oak flavor is coming along. Next time.

Cherry Wine

I only brewed my version of Michael Tonsmeire’s cherry wine two months ago.

I wasn’t planning to touch this any time soon, but it’s been a few weeks since I racked it onto the dry sour cherries and many of them are still floating well above the liquid level.

I pulled a gravity sample of this and then racked some of my backup solera beer onto it. Probably half a gallon.

Gravity: 1.009

Appearance: Bright red. The cherries are definitely showing.

Aroma: A bit more going on than the solera beer. I get the cherries a bit and some other slightly medicinal aromas that I can’t quite identify.

Flavor: Not very sour yet. There is a subtle cherry flavor, but largely similar to the solera beer at this point.

Apricot Pale Sour

I brewed this apricot sour the same day I made the cherry wine, and it’s been sitting on 1/2 lb per gallon of organic unsulphured dry apricots for about a month.

This one also needed a top up, but not much. Just about a quart of my kettle soured Berliner Weisse filled it up to the neck, and submerged all the fruit.

Gravity: 1.011

Appearance: Hazy pale yellow

Aroma: Great apricot aroma already. Wow! This is far more intense and well developed than the cherry beer.

Flavor: Slightly tart, lots of bright apricot flavor.

Closing Thoughts

These are all very young beers still so I’m trying not to read too much into these tastings.

The two reds have me feeling a little nervous. Not bad per se, but I’m worried about the direction they’re going.

The apricot one is tasting great though! I hope it only improves from here.

I ended up with about 1.75 gallons of top up flanders red left. I racked as much as I could save into a 1 gallon glass jug and a 64oz growler for future barrel top-ups.