Oud Bruin

[Barley Water]

Well, I finally got around to doing something with my Oud Bruin which is roughly 18 months old. The stuff has been sitting in a keg in my hobby room and I have not so much as even tried it until this weekend when I blended half of it with young Oud Bruin then topped up the keg with the young stuff. In six months, I will then have a blend of roughly 2 year old stuff and 6 month old stuff and I can pull some more out again as long as I make up another young batch to top off with. Now that the Rosalere blend is available year round, you can do this whenever you like. The flavor was great with that neat sour aroma and the sourness was pretty smooth, not at all medicinal, I am one happy camper. I really didn't know what to expect since I have never tried this before, I could have easily made 5 gallons of high grade swill. Since the young stuff is pretty sweet, the combination is the much sought after sweet and sour combination. I added a bunch of corn sugar and set up a bunch of Belgian 750's with the corks and wire cages, I can't wait to try some of this stuff once it is carbonated (a couple weeks anyway). Of course, I also set aside just a few bottles for competition so we will see how it goes (assuming of course they don't just blow up, they don't let you submit in Belgian bottles so I am living dangerously). I looked into the cornie when I was pulling some out and there is some funky looking stuff floating around in there but the beer itself was crystal clear, I guess that is just part of the charm of the whole deal. Maybe I can find someplace to source some sour cherries next time I pull some out of the keg, it would be neat to have some decent kriek.

I now have my Weisebier factory going full tilt, God that stuff is a mess, it blows out of the ferentor every single time no matter what you do.

[mysterio]

Sounds great man

I assume you have some kind of corking device ? How much do these cost ?

I have a bunch of champagne style bottles which I got specifically for beer. I had a dubbel which went sour (not in a good way) because I didn't sanitise the bottles well enough, and a Wit which I used plastic corks in (without cages), which turned out OK, except a month down the line when the corks would fire off randomly at a very high velocity. One time my cousins were visiting (about 6 and 8 years old) and a cork popped out one of the bottles and straight into a nice Schneider Weiss glass which shattered about a meter or two away from them ! So I assume either the bottles have a monastic curse or I'm just very careless.

Once I have the discipline I would like to try making an Oud Bruin. I set aside my flanders red in a keg which I planned to blend at a later date but it got demolished last Christmas.

[Barley Water]

Oh yeah, I have the mother of all corking devices and it was very expensive, I want to say around $150 or so. That thing takes the Belgian 750 corks and squeezes them down to the diameter of a pensil before inserting it into the bottle. You know, you can crown cap many champagne bottles. I have seen people drive regular wine corks in them then cap on top of it if you are trying to get some "cork action" going. If you go that route though, when the crown cap comes off, that cork may come flying out of there pretty quickly.

[mysterio]

Have you got a link to the corker you're talking about ?

[Barley Water]

I have one of these things. Bear in mind, it will not drive champagne corks, only wine corks and the Belgian corks (but that's ok with me because I don't care for champagne anyway).

http://morewinemaking.com/view_product/ ... lian_Floor

[TheMumbler]

Quite an achievement on the Bruin you must have the patience of a saint. Now I'm tempted to have a shot, but I'm not sure I could manage the logistics of it. I'd try and wangle and invite to try some if I didn't live some thousands of miles away. Oddly enough I ran into a guy I used to play football with at Christmas and he is living out in Texas now, small world and all that.

That corker looks pretty cool, I'd love to be able to bottle some belgian brews like that.

[Barley Water]

Well, I am not really all that patient and I sure as hell am not a saint. Actually, I was somewhat scarred to try it because I really didn't know how it was going to turn out. The thing with sour beers is that you need two sets of everything that touches the beer other than glassware since you really can't get the bugs out of plastic buckets or tubing. I do have these nightmares of brett taking over my entire brewery and I keep all my gear separated so that doesn't happen. I just put the cornie with the beer under a table so that I will forget about it and get interested in other projects. I really don't see myself drinking sour beer all the time, it's good but it's somewhat of a novalty. Having said that, I was so pleased with the way this came out, I may well start up another cornie of something else just to see what other crazy stuff I can come up with. I have that Jeff Sparrow book, I should flick through it and see what other concoctions he has tried, maybe mess around with bugs and oak? How about an old fasioned three treads porter, humm...................

[TheMumbler]

I have that Jeff Sparrow book, I should flick through it and see what other concoctions he has tried, maybe mess around with bugs and oak? How about an old fasioned three treads porter, humm...................

lancsSteve got that recently so I might see if I can get a look at it. Somebody or other suggested using a different post type on your corny for bacterial brews, to help avoid mix ups. Not sure where I'd get a pin-lock corny though. I guess you just mark the plastic vessels and tubes clearly.

[lancsSteve]

Wow - well impressed at that effort. I've got v. in to the 'wild brews' book for info. First plan is a gose with the berlinner weisse blend (which has lacto and i believe some brett in it) but v. intrigued by things like oud bruin.

Do you wood age any of your beers? Any thoughts on good sources for wooden casks and ageing in wood?

Been looking at these: http://www.thebarrelmakers.co.uk/small_ ... index.html (the ones at the end of the page needless to say) and some of the eBay suppliers who ship from mexico e.g. http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/20L-Wood-Wooden-W ... 651wt_1141

[Barley Water]

I have only one experience using oak (chips) so I am no expert. Also, I have looked into the barrels and to tell you the truth, they look like a great big pain in the butt to me. The basic problem is that (at least according to what I have read which made sense to me) you really need a 55 gallon barrel otherwise the ratio of oak surface area/volume of beer is way too high. My wife would absolutely "birth a heffer" if I tried to keep a 55 gallon barrel in the house, especially if it sprang a leak. Hell, she got really mad at me when my fish tank pumped 25 gallons of water on her carpet and hey, that was only water. Oak, especially new oak, really affects the taste of the beer and I would think it would be very easy to overdo it. I want to say I used about 1 1/2 oz of American Oak chips in an English pale ale with seven days contact time in a 5 gallon batch (it was a Firestone Walker clone) and the effect was dramatic. The problem in my mind with doing sour beers and combining that with barrel aging is there are way too many variables running at the same time which all conspire to mess up your beer. If I combine bugs with oak, I think I will use chips or cubes in a cornie. It is much easier to control what's going on in stainless steel and once you get the beer in there, the maintence is next to nothing (also, a used cornie is way cheaper than a barrel). One other advantage of a cornie is that stainless is not permeable to oxigen. If too much oxigen gets into the beer, you will end up with vinegar, just a little is great, a lot completely wrecks the beer.

My one experiment with oak did work out well however so I plan to play with it a bit more. Maybe latter in the spring, I may try oaking an IPA or maybe a brown porter (or both). The vanilla flavor oak brings would make for a very interesting brew and it would be sort of a throwback to the time when all beer was stored in wooden barrels.