Herb table beer

After lacto fermenting some carrots, I decided to use the brine to inoculate some unhopped wort made from spraymalt.

After a few weeks of sitting there I put a small amount of the Wilner Brett strain in the mix.

At my allotment my chamomile and lemon balm was taking over the herb patch, so great bunches were cut, leaves and flowers. I made more wort with spraymalt, and boiled the herbs in for about 5 minutes. I don't know the exact weight of herbs but the impression was about the same ratio of herb to water as I would normally use when boiling spaghetti. Enough water to cover plus a bit of space in the middle...

Medieval precision aside, the wort was allowed to cool and pitched on top of the lacto sour. After 12 hours a some dry Nottingham was sprinkled on top. The gravity was probably about 1.040.

Entirely separately I turbid mashed a 90 percent lager malt 10 percent rolled oats grist to give a 1.035 wort. Hopped with 20 IBU of Fuggles, and inoculated only with bottle dreggs from some saisons including Brett for a few days. Then the St Austell brewery strain was pitched. After a week it was dry hopped with 0.5 g per litre of Fuggles and spent three days on the hops.

The sour was very sour, and the turbid stock ale was slightly smokey. I blended a bit of each using a pipette and the result was much greater than the sum of the parts. After a bit of messing about I decided on 60 - 40 stock to sour. Each was racked in the right proportion to a new bucket. After three days of melding the mix was bottled to 3.0 vols in 750 ml champagne style bottles which were capped.

The finished beer is a good level of sour. The lemon balm gives a tea like flavour, rather than fresh lemon, which gives a more lemon-curdy taste. I think this beer might have been better as not a sour. The herb aromatics would add pungent floral flavour to a hoppy beer. As it is the sourness just cuts through the floral too early. If this was re-brewed, I'd stick to a clean saison yeast and load it up with Sazz. It is hard to tell with so much going on, but I think the turbid mash adds an interesting grainy flavour.

Stout with Soured Portion

A dry stout was brewed. It was 70% pale (Crisp-Flagon), 10% homemade invert syrup number 4, 10% roasted barley, 10% unmalted wheat. Water was Bristol water untreated. 21IBU at 60mins using cascade pellets. 5g of cascade at 5mins (10L batch), 10g of styrian goldings at 20mins. (I use no chill so these were actually 5 mins before end of boil for the styrians and 10 mins after for the cascade). I get bored of comercial beers using american hops, (if I want tropical fruit juice, I can buy tropical fruit juice cheaper than beer), but I like a bit of cascade in bitters and dark beers. It can lift them without being dominant.

The invert syrup was treated as sugar when inputing to my software, knowing the weight of sugar that went into the syrup it was easy to work out the sugar-liquid ratio and adjust accordingly. It was 500/820, and it hasn't gone off a few months after, so theres something to aim for if you are wondering how to stave off unwanted microbes using osmotic pressure. I started with waitrose demmerara sugar. The finished syrup was black and had a liquorice/burnt sugar taste, a bit like a cross between a creme-brulee topping and treacle (for those who live in the UK).

I drew off about a pint of unhopped wort to sour, which I kept on top of a radiator for about five days adding a little bit of sourdough dough a few days in. It had developed a sourness and dirty bread aroma by day 5. I then boiled to sanitise and blended back with the main beer once it had cooled.


The beer looked like this,

And was terribly good. When sipping the frothy mousey head, the first flavour is sugar, mix of dark brown and burnt. Then bitterness wells up, both hop bitterness and burnt sugar/roast barley acrid bitterness, this seems to stimulate the whole tounge in a very firm but balanced way and then there is a brief pause of carbonic spritzyness and then just a lingering complex roasty sugary burnt slightly hoppy melange. I'm not sure the sourness is perceptible but might be accentuating the sugary flavours. I was told this is one of the best beers I have brewed.