One of my favorite styles these days is mixed fermentation tart saison. Earlier in the year I made my first attempt at brewing one myself. For that beer, I blended about 20% kettle soured berliner weisse to a saison that had brett, but no souring bacteria added. It isn’t finished yet, but from some gravity samples I think it’s going to end up being tasty, but not as tart as I expected from my blending tests.

For my second go at the style, I’m going to use a full range of brett and souring bacteria. To hopefully get a light tartness instead of full-on souring, I’m going to mash low and wait until a few days into fermetation before adding the sour bugs.

Update: After some intermediate samples I decided this beer could use some adjuncts to make things a bit more interesting. On the theme of native North American ingredients, I’m going to split the beer onto cranberries (cooked down with some red wine), blueberries, and local honey*. I’ll bottle what remains as-is.

This batch continues the deep dive I’ve been taking into mixed fermentation brewing over the last 6 months. I have a bunch of sours in the pipeline now and I’d like to get some funky, non-sour, brett beers going. I brewed my first brett saison a few weeks ago. This will be my second attempt in the broad style of funky saison.

Watching the 10 year retrospective from The Mad Fermentationist’s yearly dark saison project was inspirational. I’m hoping to keep up my own similar series. I think I’ll probably take inspiration from Mike and friends the first couple years, and then strike out with my own experimental brews as I get more comfortable with this style of funky brewing.

One of the standout beers from that tasting was year four’s American Farmhouse Currant Dark Saison. I’m going to brew that recipe for the first shot at this style.

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.

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.