Time for another solera update.

I’ll be brewing two batches to get enough volume for this year. I expect to need about seven and a half gallons to refill the barrel and the rest will go into a keg for top ups. I’m pulling about half of the barrel’s volume this year instead of a third. The barrel is still tasting good, but I’m worried it might be starting to go in a direction I don’t like, so I’m going to pull some extra now while it’s still tasting nice.

I filled a keg last year for top ups, and I really liked the process of topping up from the keg. Unfortunately the beer in the keg ended up not tasting great, so I’m going to dump the old keg and try again with fresh beer this year.

I’d like to modify the solera to be a bit less sour so half of this year’s beer will be fermented without any lactic bacteria, just Sacch and Brett. I’ll be using Omega’s C2C Saison blend for this.

I’ve used C2C in the past and I think it made a perfect blending beer. No really loud flavors, just a subtle and pleasantly funky beer that melded really well with other sours. (It’s nice on its own too, the white wine saison I made with it is one of my favoite funky beers so far).

Last year was my first serious year of brewing funky and sour beers. A lot of what I brewed was aiming for bold fruit flavors. I added fruit to my cherry wine and apricot sour very early in their fermentations, aiming for a depth of fruit flavors in the final products. The dark saison got zante currants as soon as it went into secondary.

I think I’ll still brew that way occasionally in the future, but in general I’m going to start waiting for the base beer to mature, and then decide what further additions to make, if any.

In this case I’m going for a pale sour similar to my apricot sour, but I’ll hold off on any fruit additions at first. I’m hoping the base beer will turn out complex, sour, and funky. When it’s ready, I’ll let its final character dictate where to go from there.

Some fruit options I’m considering are peaches, sour cherries, blueberries, or wine grapes. I’ll also bottle some of it straight if it’s interesting on it’s own.

The solera project is about to turn one year old. Before I can package the first year’s beer, I need get year two’s refill ready to go in.

I’ll be brewing two batches to get enough volume for this year. I expect to need about six gallons to refill the barrel and the rest will age in a keg that I’ll use to keep the barrel topped up. I think I’ll get enough extra in the keg for about two years of top ups.

Last year, top ups were the most error prone and annoying part of the barrel aging process. Each time I topped up the barrel, I had to rack the top up beer into smaller and smaller vessels to avoid leaving excessive headspace. In the end I wasted a lot of the top up beer, and the top up beer that remained at the end of the year didn’t taste great.

Storing the top up beer in a keg and topping up the barrel with a picnic tap should be a much nicer way to keep the barrel full. I’ll never have to rack the top up beer around again, and it’ll always be protected from oxygen.

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.

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.

This is the recipe for my Flanders Red solera project as brewed in late 2019.

It’s a slightly Americanized take on the style, based on the “Wine Barrel Flemish Red” from American Sour Beers. I may change it a bit over the years as I see how the beer develops. I’ll link to any new posts related to this recipe in the notes.

I’ve been itching to start my own sour solera project ever since I started making sour beer. Barrels aren’t a requirement for a solera, lots of people make them in carboys or other vessels. But I have a romantic image of barrel aged beers and wanted to try the process for myself.

Prior to this project I’d never brewed with a barrel or even seriously considered getting one. I did a lot of background reading and I want to share what I learned getting ready for my project.

Choose a barrel size

Used barrels come in a wide variety of sizes. A standard American whiskey barrel is 53 gallons. Wine barrels are typically a little larger. 60 gallons is a common size.

Smaller barrels in the 5 to 30 gallon range are also available on the used market. Most come from small whiskey producers. I’m not aware of any sources for small wine barrels or if any wineries even use small barrels. It seems that if you want a small used barrel, you’re getting a whiskey barrel.

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.

I’ve always liked Berliner Weisse, but never brewed one. And I’ve been wanting to experiment with kettle souring.

The procedure I’m following comes from this great presentation by Derek Springer: Berliner and Beyond: Sour Mashing and Its Applications

In short:

• Make a starter for your lacto
• Get your wort under 4.5 pH as soon as possible to deter unwanted microbes
• Hold at a happy temperature for your lacto strain
• Minimize oxygen exposure by covering with plastic wrap
• Finally, boil, chill, and pitch yeast as normal to finish the beer