Coolship - tasting after 6 weeks

6 weeks after brewing, and two weeks after transferring it to a non-cleaned barrel, I tasted again the coolship-lambic, hoping that the awfull taste of peas and metal would have turned into something a little more appealing. Nope! Still rather horrible, although already a little sour. I am still hoping the bacteria will do something wonderfull to the esters probably produced by the different enterobacter-bacteria.

As you can see, the remains of the pellicle of our 7months old lambic quickly turned into a new pellicle, protecting the beer against the oxygen in the free space above.

Rhetorics of Food. Conference KU Leuven

At the end of may, there will be an interdisciplinary conference at KU Leuven (Belgium) about the rhetorics of food. Surprinsingly, there is even a theology-section. So what could be more on topic than godisgood?

http://ghum.kuleuven.be/lcis/Documents/cfp-rhetorics-of-food.pdf 

Here's my abstract for the conference:

God is Good. A Theology of Spontaneous Fermentation

How is the vast majority of all the commercially available wines made, today? By adding sulphites to the crushed grapes in order to kill most of the bacteria and wild yeasts on the grapes. In a next stage, the fermentation will be performed by adding a cultured and clean yeast strain. These practices are sustained by a rhetoric of taste, consistency (and sometimes health), in which nature is deemed as fundamentally untrustworthy. However, some old/rediscovered practices in winemaking, beer (lambic/gueuze), bread (sourdough) and cheese prove differently: that we cannot attain the same level of complexity and richness in taste by adding cultured yeast/bacteria, after initially killing all the wild ones. They prove that what is actually at stake in the schism between spontaneous and non-spontaneous fermentation is the possibility of a large-scale industrial production and profit-making.    

In this paper I delve into the rhetorics of modern, cultured/controlled fermentation (and food production) by examining some of the epistemological and theological premises on which the practices of fermentation are built. My main guide in this investigation will be the theological (meta)critique of Kantian theory by Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788), who unveiled (almost a century before Marx) the complicity of our modes of knowing and producing, demonstrating that the ‘pure’ practices of modern knowing are far from neutral epistemological operations, but that they are the ideological complement of capitalist production; With Hamann, I will counter this complicity with a different, more organic epistemology and with a plea for more organic modes of production.   

Of course, this paper presentation will be accompanied by a tasting of lambic.

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First lambic - 7 months old

After 7 months in our new 30liter oak barrel, we thought it was time to transfer our first lambic to some demijohns. The beer is more than sour enough already, but we were especially afraid that the wood-character would become too dominant. And of course, we had some new beer ready to fill it again.

We also decided to add 6kg of sour cherry's (in dutch: Gorsemkriek) to 20 liters of the lambic. 7 months is generally considered too early to add fruit. But we took the risk.

Classic lambic-brewers state that a good lambic must go through a stage of being 'sick'. At this stage (starting mostly in spring, when the temperatures rise again) the pellicle becomes ropy/slimy and the lambic itself oily. When the temperatures drop again, the oily-character dissappears again. After this, the beer is ready for blending or adding fruit. The ropiness would be the result of some kind of pediococcus (also known as bacillus viscosus bruxellencis).

I'm not sure if this so-called 'sickness' always manifests itself when making sour beers/ home made lambics. Are these type of pediococcus part of the wyeast-lambic blend? Or do they come from some of the bottle dregs I added? No idea. Anyway, our lambic was definitely sick already. I tasted a little about 3 weeks ago, and it seemed normal. Today, it was very oily. We'll see what will happen with the cherry's, adding them to a sick lambic. The plan is to leave the sour cherries at colder temperatures (now it's about 10° celcius - but it will rise in spring) for a few months in the demijohn. After that we'll transfer the kriek to a new demijohn untill it's ready for bottling (I guess after summer). Curious when the oily-character will disappear.

The remaining 10liter will be split later in two parts: one for further ageing, one probably for adding raspberries to.

The gravity-reading of the lambic indicated 1012, which is still surprisingly high considering the fact we did a fairly standard infusion mash and the warmer temperatures of summer and fall. Maybe the measurement isn't really accurate because of the viscosity??

coolship/wild starter batch

After about a month (2 weeks cold/ 2 weeks cold), I checked again the gravity of one of the wild batches I made. Turns out the gravity already dropped to 1006. This is way lower than I expected it to be. I never thought the wild saccharomyces would be so attenuative. Also the colder temperatures (about 10 degrees celcius) didn't really slow down/inhibit the alcoholic fermentation. 

The problem is of course, that there are barely any more nutrients left for the souring bacteria and brettanomyces, to turn this beer into a complex sour beer. There were just too much simple sugar chains. Maybe it would have still had a higher gravity when I had restrained myself from adding the wild starter; but anyway, I probably underestimated the attenuative force of wild saccharomyces, and so the importance of a more complex mash-scheme, in order to produce enough complex sugar chaines. For the next batches, I will definitely pay more attention to the mash scheme (higher temperatures?) and the use of unmalted grain (wheat or maize).

 The yeast also did flocculate quite well (I also didn't expect that). The taste is still very vegetal/peas-like, a little bit metallic and very thin.

The plan is to transfer both batches tomorrow to a small wooden barrel. Maybe I can still add some extra wort, made of mainly unmalted grains, to the beer, in order to provide some nutrients for the bacteria and the brettanomyces (if it's not too late already).

Sauerkraut

Nothing as easy as making sauerkraut. In the beginning of the fall, I thinly sliced 2/3 cabbages, mixed it with some salt, and crushed them in a crock, so that all the cabbage became submerged in its own juice. The first times, I also did add some lactobacillus (from yoghurt), but this turns out to be superfluous. When using organic vegetables, there's always enough of the souring bacteria present of the vegetables itself.

After adding all to the crock, I leave it about a week at 25° celcius. After 3/4/5 weeks at cooler temperatures (10/15°) it's ready to eat. The first times, I leave everything in the crock, and take from there what I need. But: the more you open the lid, the chances of infection/molds increase. So, when the first, white pellicle (very akin to the pellicles of wild beer fermentation) appears, I transfer the remaining kraut to jars, and put them in the fridge. I also kept some of the remaining brine, which I'll probably use to add some of the lactobacillus to a small batch of unfermented beer wort, or to a part of the wild, and already fermented batch (keeping it some days at 30°).

Sancta Sanctorum: Cantillon

Last wednesday, I had to be in Brussels for work together with a colleague and friend who is also a lover of spontaneous beers. Around 4, we hopped over to the Cantillon brewery for a quick (foto)tour, but more importantly to try a beer on the list, we've never had before. At the little bar in Cantillon, they sell some bottles which are no longer available in the shop. You can buy those in 75cl bottles, on condition you drink them in the bar. We ordered the cantillon Fou' Foune, a apricot-Lambic: a wonderfull beer, with lots of dry abricot in the taste, and a long aftertaste.

the copper coolship beneath the ceiling

For those of you not familiar with Cantillon. Check them out! They're absolutely beyond category. They are producers of the most pure, authentic Lambic, using traditional methods, and at the same time, the most experimental of all the Belgian Lambic producers. Next to the regular gueuze, kriek and framboise (rosé de gambrinus) versions, they offer versions of Lambic with white grapes (vigneronne), red grapes (lamvinus) and as said apricots (fou' foune). They also have a elderberry-flower macerated Lambic (mamouche), and a spontaneously fermented pale ale dryhopped with fresh hops (Iris).

This blog isn't about famous breweries. I just wanted to mention Cantillon for they are truly the pinnacle of wild brewing; this is how perfection tastes, letting wild yeast and bacteria flourish.

some old delicous bottles

an active fermenation

Lamvinus - finally got to buy some bottles

Fou' Foune - apricot lambic

1st coolship experiment

In the last two weeks we brewed two separate batches of 15l of fairly low-hopped wort. We cooled it outside during the night, hoping it would be inoculated by wild yeast and bacteria favouring a spontaneous fermentation. Two separate kettles (5l, 10 l) were covered with a hopbag.

It was racked to a demijohn in the morning.

The first batch: two days in a row, nothing happened, till suddenly a very small, white krausen appeared. There were blubs in the airlock about every 15 seconds. Of course, I was hoping that it would speed up. But after 3 days of slowly fermenting, it even slowed down. I decided to check gravity: 1052. Exactly the same as the original gravity. The smell was extremely vegetal (mainly dried peas). I didn't dare to taste it. In the early days it's mainly enterobacter (e.g. e-coli...) doing its thing, which might be harmfull; The potential harmfullness becomes later inhibited by the alcohol and lower ph.

Looking back, I was probably too impatient, fearing that there was insufficient sacharomyces in the wort to get an alcoholic fermentation started. (Only later, I read that enterobacter slows down the start of the alcoholic fermentation. After a while however, the ph drops, because, next to sometimes unpleasant flavours they also produce acids, which will favor the growth of sacharomyces over enterobacter. The whole process might take some time - days, weeks?) I decided to add a little bit of wild starter culture I made about a month ago (I added 3 liters of fairly hopped wort with a low density of about 1032 to the dregs of a spontaneously fermented sloe wine. The wine did ferment fairly quick, and so did the wort-starter. The tast was very clean, so I suppose it's mainly saccharomyces).

Two days later, the alcoholic fermentation started well, with a blub every second or so in the airlock, and a thicker krausen (still extremely fine and white foam). Today, ten days later, it's still going good (every two seconds).The gravity is 1030 for the first batch, and 1025 for the second one (here I added the starter culture immediately in the morning after the cooling outside.) I also had a sip of both batches: vegetal (peas again), little metallic, a very little sour (first batch); not really delicious, but I wasn't expecting that.

In a few days, I will transfort the demijohns to a cooler place. I don't want the saccharomyces to eat too many of the sugars, supposing that a slow and colder fermentation benefits bacterial growth. In an other experiment, I will raise the temperature after the primary alcoholic fermentation, for higher temperatures would benefit an exponential growth of especially lactobacillus-bacteria.

The hypothesis is that a slow and cooler fermentation produces a more complex sour beer, where a warm fermentation speeds things up, but at the cost of complexity.

In about a month, we will empty our oak barrel (30l) and fill it again with both batches. In another plan, I'm thinking of buying a new chestnut barrel of 50l, in the hope that new chestnut gives a less-oppressive wood-character to the beer than oak does.