El_Exorcisto
Well-Known Member
So I'm brewing my first funky beer later this week. After reading some stuff over at The Mad Fermentationist I'm going to use BM45 wine yeast to develop the jam flavors and leave a good amount of residual sugar for the bugs to use. I'm going so let that run until primary fermentation is wrapping up, then rack it to secondary. Here's where it'll get a little different.
I am going to be using a bacteria slurry from my father's grain fermentation bucket which has become a primordial soup of various souring microbes and wild yeasts. He ferments dry corn and barley to feed his chickens since it improves digestibility and nutrition. The soup smells like bread and pineapple juice, with a little whiff of butter.
Along with the wild soup I am going to pitch Wyeast brettanomyces lambicus, just in case there isn't a brett species in the slurry so I don't end up with diacetyl bombs due to the pedio that I'm pretty sure is in there.
After this monstrosity ferments out for a few months I'll rack off a gallon into a glass carboy as a control and to free up space for 5 lbs of wild blueberries I picked over the summer. I'll let that run wild as long as it wants too then bottle. I'll also float a small chunk of white oak in the main secondary as a mother culture for my next funk and to give the brett some cellobiose to much on.
Should I go with a traditional lambic grain bill of 6lbs pale malt and 3 lbs of flaked wheat? Should I make it a funky brown and just use munich as my base malt? Crystal seems kind of pointless since the bugs will have a pile of residual sugars after the wine yeast wraps up. I don't have lambic hops, so should I just boil an ounce of crystals for 30 minutes? Just mash hop ala Berliner? Should I boil at all, or should I keep the lacto alive that's in a non-boiled wort to add additional bugs? SO many questions...
I am going to be using a bacteria slurry from my father's grain fermentation bucket which has become a primordial soup of various souring microbes and wild yeasts. He ferments dry corn and barley to feed his chickens since it improves digestibility and nutrition. The soup smells like bread and pineapple juice, with a little whiff of butter.
Along with the wild soup I am going to pitch Wyeast brettanomyces lambicus, just in case there isn't a brett species in the slurry so I don't end up with diacetyl bombs due to the pedio that I'm pretty sure is in there.
After this monstrosity ferments out for a few months I'll rack off a gallon into a glass carboy as a control and to free up space for 5 lbs of wild blueberries I picked over the summer. I'll let that run wild as long as it wants too then bottle. I'll also float a small chunk of white oak in the main secondary as a mother culture for my next funk and to give the brett some cellobiose to much on.
Should I go with a traditional lambic grain bill of 6lbs pale malt and 3 lbs of flaked wheat? Should I make it a funky brown and just use munich as my base malt? Crystal seems kind of pointless since the bugs will have a pile of residual sugars after the wine yeast wraps up. I don't have lambic hops, so should I just boil an ounce of crystals for 30 minutes? Just mash hop ala Berliner? Should I boil at all, or should I keep the lacto alive that's in a non-boiled wort to add additional bugs? SO many questions...