It's been a little while since I've said anything about my attempt at a sour cranberry ale with Brett. Well, this beer has been quietly sitting on the cranberries and the Brett for several months now and had developed a nice pellicle on and around the floating raft of cranberries. Much of the pellicle has actually fallen away by now and I figured it was time to get the beer off the fruit and into a tertiary vessel. So, I racked it into a 3-gallon glass carboy and added 0.5 ounces of medium toast Hungarian oak cubes that had been soaking in some Deep Purple zinfandel (BTW, this is a spectacular wine).
The beer is a a hazy pink with some nice sour and Brett aromas. The taste is actually quite mild, but not too mild - I definitely taste the cranberries and the Brett character. I'm assuming the Brett character will increase a bit more as it ages. I'm excited about this beer - I think it just might turn out really good, despite all the crazy things I'm trying with it (e.g. 14% acidulated malt, primary fermentation with a wine yeast, cranberries, Brett, wine-soaked oak cubes). However, the one thing that is concerning me is that the gravity is only down to 1.018-1.020 (I think my hydrometer is reading a little high, thus the range). I really expected this thing to be much lower by now. It still tastes great - much drier than I would expect given a 1.020 gravity. Everything I've read and heard seems to indicate that Brett pretty much eats through anything. This is precisely the reason I mashed high (~160°F) and used a wine yeast - to leave some residual compounds for the Brett to metabolize. I'm not sure why the gravity is still as high as it is. I've posted about this over at the Burgundian Babble Belt homebrew forum and the only thing that seems to have any consensus might be that the Brettanomyces claussenii isn't a particularly strong attenuator.
So, for now, my plan is to let it sit in the tertiary vessel for a month or so and see where it goes. I'm hoping to be able to bottle by the end of August so that it has a few months in the bottle before Thanksgiving. Not sure yet what my bottling plan is - I'd like it to highly carbonated, so ideally I'd like to cork and cage with 750 ml champagne bottles, but I'm not really set up for that and I'm not sure I should splurge for the equipment for just this beer (though if it turns out well, there will certainly be similar beers to brew in the future). In any case, I have some time to think about this.
7 comments:
I just bottled a Saison Brett to 3.0 volumes in champagne bottles, but instead of investing in an expensive bottle corker I went with these plastic corks I found at midwest brew supply.
http://tinyurl.com/3vcs7lv
They fit super tight, and you still cage them obviously. Maybe not quite as esthetically pleasing to the eye as a true cork, but still pretty cool. Beer has been bottled for two weeks and seem to be holding tight! They definitely don't fit tight enough for most belgian bottles though. I'll let you know as it might be a good alternative for ya.
Hmmm...those look really intriguing. How do you use them? Just hammer them down?
Thanks for the tip. Let me know how they hold. I'll ask around if anyone else has used these as well.
That beer sounds awesome. New Glarus brewing had a one off Cran-Lambic that was amazing. I bottled a farmhouse ale in champagne bottles, I used the red barron capper (switching the plates around) so you can cap over the lip. Even with the bottle cap, they looked cool.
Howz this shaping up?
Amazingly and counter to my plans, this is still sitting in tertiary. I just haven't had the time to bottle it or even check it. I'm afraid that it won't be ready for Thanksgiving this year and it may be sitting on oak too long at this point. I'm hopinh to check it this week and, if I am lucky, bottle it too.
Just so you know...I don't recommend bottle conditioning with those plastic corks. Only about half of my bottles held carbonation. Luckily I was able to re-carb and use a large bottle cap for them and they are drinking mighty fine right now!
So far, the two plastic-corked bottles I have opened were fine - in fact the last one was super carbonated. I have about 6 bottles remaining with the plastic corks, so hopefully they'll all be OK too. I was skeptical with some of the bottles that didn't seem to get a real tight fit. I decided not to use some bottles that just seemed too loose.
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