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??