JustinG
Member
I've never brewed any sour beers, and I had no plans to for the immediate future, but last weekend (4 days ago) I brewed a 1bbl batch of a session IPA and ended up with 1 gallon of wort afterward. My plan was to take this and boil it with 2 gallons of unhopped wort (50/50 light/wheat DME) to make 3 gallons of relatively-low IBU wort and then leave it in my backyard for a while and see what kind of local yeasts I can pick up.
The problem is that, due to several scheduling issues, I was unable to pick up the DME until this afternoon, so the wort was just sitting on my kitchen counter in a large erlenmeyer flask at 76F ambient (covered tightly with aluminum foil and with a towel around it to protect from UV exposure). It looked like there were a few tiny mold spores forming yesterday, but other than that, it didn't seem to be doing much.
Fast-forward to today: I finally got the DME and figured I'd get this done and set out this evening, but when I took the cover off the flask, I found it to be in high krausen, fermenting away.
So the problem now (besides having a gross base beer with a 4-day lag time from cooling to fermenting) is that I have 1 gallon already fermenting with what I would suspect is saccharomyces (the flask, although cleaned, previously contained Safale S-04). If I boil the other 2 gallons, chill, and blend together, won't the saccharomyces just ferment the rest of it, without giving other yeasts a chance to compete? What are my options now?
The only thing I can think of is to let this current beer finish and just do the 2 gallons of unhopped wheat beer separately, and hold the first beer in secondary while I wait for the other beer to take off with wild yeasts. Then I could blend them together, which would presumably allow the original beer to undergo a second fermentation (assuming that I get some sort of brettanomyces or the like from the wild fermentation). Is this the best option?
What would happen if I just added the new wort to the already-fermenting first beer? Would I just get a gross beer fermented with what I assume is saccharomyces? Or will I still have a shot at getting some other bugs in there if I let it ferment open outside?
Sorry for the length, and thanks in advance!
The problem is that, due to several scheduling issues, I was unable to pick up the DME until this afternoon, so the wort was just sitting on my kitchen counter in a large erlenmeyer flask at 76F ambient (covered tightly with aluminum foil and with a towel around it to protect from UV exposure). It looked like there were a few tiny mold spores forming yesterday, but other than that, it didn't seem to be doing much.
Fast-forward to today: I finally got the DME and figured I'd get this done and set out this evening, but when I took the cover off the flask, I found it to be in high krausen, fermenting away.
So the problem now (besides having a gross base beer with a 4-day lag time from cooling to fermenting) is that I have 1 gallon already fermenting with what I would suspect is saccharomyces (the flask, although cleaned, previously contained Safale S-04). If I boil the other 2 gallons, chill, and blend together, won't the saccharomyces just ferment the rest of it, without giving other yeasts a chance to compete? What are my options now?
The only thing I can think of is to let this current beer finish and just do the 2 gallons of unhopped wheat beer separately, and hold the first beer in secondary while I wait for the other beer to take off with wild yeasts. Then I could blend them together, which would presumably allow the original beer to undergo a second fermentation (assuming that I get some sort of brettanomyces or the like from the wild fermentation). Is this the best option?
What would happen if I just added the new wort to the already-fermenting first beer? Would I just get a gross beer fermented with what I assume is saccharomyces? Or will I still have a shot at getting some other bugs in there if I let it ferment open outside?
Sorry for the length, and thanks in advance!