Les Framboises du Mal: Vintage 2010

The fresh one. Fruity and juicy with enough acidity and funk to balance things out. Darker than previous years as some of the raspberries were actually blackberries.

Still not quite in condition but quite enjoyable.

Les Framboises du Mal: Vintage 2009

This one still tastes like raspberries, but not as cloyingly as it did a year ago. Still very sour but seems to be getting more funky with time.

What to do with the remaining bottles? They should continue to age well but the raspberry flavor will fade. With this year's batch ready that should serve as a fruity sour beer and I could keep the 2009 around to let it's funk progress and do its thang.

Les Framboises du Mal: Vintage 2008

2 years in and no more raspberries. The funk has won. Le goût d'Orval! Mais rouge.

That was the last bottle. Makes me want to brew a batch of beer, add Orval dregs in secondary. Then stick it in the basement and forget about it for several years.

Rhubarb Sour

Here it is, the crazy rhubarb sour beer.

Hazy burnished orange. The rhubarb added some color but not the vibrant red of its ripe stalks. Some small chunks of rhubarb appear to have made it through the sieve at bottling and float suspended in the beer but aren't perceptible when drinking. The aroma is mostly lactic sourness and a bretty funk with a slight earthy vegetal note in the background. The flavor starts off with a sharp, austere acidity and morphs into a rounded earthy, herbal bitterness. Not hop bitterness, but, well, rhubarb bitterness. The finish is bone dry, but not harsh despite the acidity and slight bitterness. Still, this is not a beer for the non-lambic lover.

I'm pleased with the rhubarb sour overall. I think one gallon was about the right batch size. Maybe I'll make more someday if I can get more rhubarb. The 11 bottles won't last long as everyone I told about this has been pestering me to try it for the past few months. I know which of them will be agog over it and which will just gag.

Tasting: Foreign Stout

Take a gallon of Double Stout, blend with a bit of funky-sour beer and age for nine months.

All the 90% dark chocolate, espresso and peaty smoke is still there. Time and funk has brought out faint cherries, port and leather notes. The rough edges have been smoothed out but the beer still finishes dry with a nice roasted bitterness. That dry finish makes it suitable for a hot summer evening. This will likely continue to improve until I can no longer resist those last few bottles.

Let There Be Funk

George Clinton once said "If the funk was going to happen, I wanted to be there." He best get to my apartment to encourage this year's Les Framboises du Mal, not that it needed any, just look at that pellicle.

Tasting: La Fontaine du Sang

After a frustrating bottling session (never using pellet hops for dry-hopping ever again) I am ready to sit down and drink a couple strong, tasty beers. So here is a comparison of the original bottling of La Fontaine du Sang and the most recent from a few weeks ago.

Original: Bottled September 19, 2009
Dark cherry color. Big cherry smell. Tart cherry taste. There is more though, mostly funky aromas and flavors. Mostly the same since it was bottled, just a bit less sweet than I remember. I wonder if the wine yeast I used at bottling killed off the Sacc. and Brett?

Fresh: Bottled May 14, 2010
This batch is a blend of a pull off the solera and fresh, non-soured beer. The solera was refilled with the fresh beer that did not go into the bottle. Straight solera beer could have stood on its own and would have been fantastic. But I wanted something with a sweet-sour balance for summer slurping.

The color is nearly the same for this version. The aroma has more barnyard funk and earthiness aside lemony acidity. The cherries are there, but faintly in the background. The taste is similarly skewed towards funk more than acidity. But this is actually drier than the first and makes the light sourness more enjoyable. I did not bother with wine yeast to condition this batch so it will likely be more interesting to age.

Brew Updates

April and May have been slow months for brewing and beer drinking in general. The beers I have brewed in Springs past were all I could find time for. Les Fleurs du Mal just received an ounce of Amarillo dry hops. Les Framboises du Mal is in primary fermentation and should be ready for raspberry additions when the early summer fruit season begins. Yay. A sharp jump in efficiency will result in both beers being stronger than past versions, both creeping towards 8% ABV.

I blended and bottled La Fontaine du Sang a week ago. A tasting and comparison to the previous bottling will be coming shortly.

Solera: La Fontaine du Sang

In the brewpot right now. The plan is to ferment clean then blend with a pull off the solera. The pre-hopped wort is sweet and almondy.

Tasting: Tweaked Saison

It's always fun to split a batch at some point in the brewing process then compare the final results. In the case of this beer I split the Tweaked Saison at bottling. Half plain and half with 1.5 gallons of some low gravity beer that has been aging, getting funky and sour.

Plain
Pours a very light copper with big, slightly off-white foam. The beer is almost as clear as if I had proper wort chiller. Aroma from the yeast is melons and clove that mingle with the oranges and grass of noble hops. The mouthfeel is soft with a very fine carbonation. Appropriately thing for a beer that is somewhere between a Saison and a Belgian pale ale. The taste is a lovely balance of sweet malt, fruity yeast, and refined bitterness, which lingers unobtrusively. I do prefer the saison made with Dupont yeast but wouldn't mind this beer any time.




Funky
The bugs from the funky brew seems to have done some work and created higher carbonation. That extra CO2 caused the yeast to get stirred up when opened and poured so it ended up cloudy in the glass. Not a problem for me though. The fine hop aroma plays second fiddle to the funk. Yogurt and tropical fruit, mango mostly. There is also the smell and taste of Flemish sour beers that I'm not sure what to call it. There is certainly a slight acetic component, albeit subdued, thankfully. The taste lacks the hops bitterness from the plain portion. Replaced by bit of tartness that doesn't overpower allows for savoring of the fruitiness and funk from each part of the blend. This turned out about as good as I could have hoped for.

Tasting: La Fontaine du Sang

The foam starts building in the bottle as soon as the cap is pried off. An experienced drinker, I have a special glass ready for my precious libation. This one shows some odd behavior when poured. The bubbles roll around slowly in suspension before lazily rising to the top, as if in a highly viscous liquid. The bubbles deceive though, the beer is actually quite light in the mouth. The color, a gorgeous deep burgundy, fits the name.

Quite a bit of complexity in aroma and flavor. Cherries and plums. Raisins and dried fruits. Apricot maybe. There is enough malt sweetness for this to be recognizable as beer but the underlying acidity accentuates the fruit and funk. I am very happy with how this turned out and it will take great patience to wait on the next pull from the solera.

Vertical Tasting: Les Framboises du Mal

With this year's batch of Les Framboises du Mal bottled and ready to drink I decided to open my second to last bottle of the 2008 brewing for a vertical tasting. I started with the the 2008 vintage...

Les Framboises du Mal 2008

Big foamy head over a deep red-orange beer that is perfectly clear to show off the streaming columns of plentiful CO2. Very fruity aroma with raspberries, light caramel malt, and the elusive pineapple brett scent. The Orval yeast is very apparent as aged Orval is a huge component of the aroma. The raspberry smell is more forward than I remember which could be the funky yeasts' doing. Finally taking a sip gives a soft dryness accompanied sub-acidity to tartness. A light malt sweetness remains. The raspberries appear in the middle which then giveway to some earthy mustiness. The 7+ percent alcohol makes no appearance. Time has been kind to this brew. I will try to hold off on the last bottle until next year in hopes a three year vertical tasting.

Les Framboises du Mal 2009


This bottle has yet to reach full carbonation so no head sat atop the shade more red than polished brass liquid. In contrast to the 2008 only an occasional buble meanders upward through the viscousity. The first whiff reaks of pungent lambic with a load of barnyard funk and a touch of almond nuttiness (odd but still nice). However, in the mouth the acidity level is much lower than a lambic but still quite tart. This beer is still rather sweet with plenty of raspberry and stone fruits. The sweet-sour balance is tilted more towards a true lambic to please me but hopefully not so far that it puts off my friends that have been anticipating this one. There is also the ropy mouthfeel you get in a real lambic. Worth the wait and I'm-afraid-to-add-up-the-cost-of-fruit. While this would cower in the shadow of the Rosé de Gambrinus, I feel I could fool some people in a blind tasting of lambics that what I have here is an honest to goodness Senne Valley blend. I plan on putting at least a case of this away for long term aging.

PS. Can you guess what I plan to brew next?

Funky Brewings

Finally another post for anyone that actually reads this modest brewing information repository. Between moving across the city and starting graduate school, blogging time has been nonexistant. Brewing history posts will, unfortunately, be even more seldom for a while and I will most likely only have time for quick posts on brewing activities.

Ahh, fall, time to start brewing again. The cool weather arrived early this year which means I have already brewed twice this fall. I cooked up another batch of saison early in September and this weekend I filled Saturday afternoon with a parti-gyle brew and bottling La Fontaine du Sang and Les Fleurs du Mal.

Only part of The Fountain of Flood was bottled. The remaining half was refilled with the first gyle to begin a solera. The second gyle received oak and a portion of my sour starter.

Dog Days of Summer Brew Update

When the temperature and humidity in the 90s, brewing just can't be any fun. Thus, since stocking up on saison in early July, nothing more intense than bottling has happened. I do have some aging beers that I can squeeze an update post out of.


Belgian Barleywine
When bottling the base beer I drew off one gallon to age some more with an "infected" oak spiral. Only bubbled a bit occasionally but never put up a pellicle. I figure at nearly 13% ABV that the bacteria and Brett. were killed off. Not much funk when I tasted it last week but it was still boozy and hot despite the extra aging time. I put it in the back of the refrigerator in hopes a few cold weeks will calm it down a bit. That main portion of the batch never carbonated so I will use wine or champagne yeast at bottling time.

La Fontaine du Sang
After two months in secondary, this one has just put up a bubbly and ropy white pellicle. A sample last week still tasted fairly clean and mostly like sweet caramel malt. Quite a ways to go for this one.

Les Framboises du Mal
I've added all the fruit I can afford to dump into beer, which now totals 5.5 lbs of raspberries and 12 oz plums from the fantastic Kimball Fruit Farm. The samples have tasted very sour and funky but I was dissappointed with the lack of fruit flavor and hue of the raspberry color, so I added plums to help rectify those problems. Although I have never heard of plums added to sour beer. The raspberries floating on top have beautifully disgusting crust.

Les Framboises du Mal

Last year I experimented with making a funky raspberry beer. It turned out great but had one problem, I only made one gallon. The pre-fruited beer is fairly similar to Les Fleurs du Mal but with some wheat malt and the hops turned down to let the funk and raspberries shine after several months of aging. As with Le Fontaine du sang, half a gallon was removed and funkified with "infected" oak. Raspberry season should be just starting when primary fermentation finishes.


Grain:
85% Belgian 2-row pale malt
10% Wheat malt
5% Crystal 20

Hops:
80 Minutes - 0.45 Galena 12.2 % AAU
80 Minutes - 0.3 ounce Saaz 6.8% AAU
15 Minutes - 0.18 ounce Perle
15 Minutes - 0.18 ounce Cascade, 9.3 AAU
0 Minutes - 0.18 ounce Perle
0 Minutes - 0.18 ounce Cascade, 9.3 AAU

Mash
113 - 20 minutes
145 - 60 minutes
162 - 20 minutes

Yeast:
repitched De Dolle yeast from Le Fontaine du Sang

OG: 1.069
72 % Efficiency.

6/22/2009: Down to 1.004 SG. Blended in the funkified half gallon portion, which had a wonderful bright lactic, yogurty acidity and a bit of bretty funk. Like a low gravity lambic! Might be another week or two before raspberries arrive at the farmer's market.

6/26/2009: Racked to secondary with 10.5 oz raspberries from farmer's market.

7/1/2009: Added 14 oz raspberries from farmer's market.

7/8/2009: Added 10 oz raspberries from farmer's market.

BBeer* Tasting

I bottled four gallons of the all Brett beer just over a month ago. One gallon was combined with sliced Gala apples and put away to age. Worried about over-carbonation and exploding bottles, I only added 1 ounce of sugar at bottling. My worries have been unfounded as an aggressive pour gives no more than a weak head that immediately falls apart. This color is a cloudy orange.** Lots of fruit in the aroma; green apples, cherries, oranges. The flavor is more of the same with some tartness developing that was not present at bottling. There is also some fresh oak character in the aroma and taste like you would find in white wine.

Overall, I have yet to make up my mind on this beer. It seems very young so I will slowly drink my through the batch. I tasted it with three different cheese, Brie, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and Vermont cheddar. All three were an excellent match.

*The extra 'B' is for Bbrettanomyces Lambicus.

**I keep a single clear bottle in rotation to monitor color and clarity. The flocculation has been so slow that there is a visible difference between the fine and murky parts of the beer. Oddly enough, the portion that I mixed with apples is brilliantly clear.

Brettanomyces Lambicus

We want the funk.

Now here we have a beer I am really excited about (more so than usual). A single strain Brettanomyces beer. For this one I kept the malt and hops simple to let the B. Lambicus shine. Unfortunately, I think using a new oak spiral may have negated that effort.










Higher than expected efficiency resulted in an OG of 1.064, a few points higher than I wanted. After 19 days the gravity had dropped to 1.020. I racked 1 gallon onto a pound of sliced Gala apples and the other 4 gallons to its own secondary fermenter. Other than taking longer, fermentation appeared normal.

At racking the beer smelled of cherries, pears, apples, tropical fruit and a touch of barnyard funk. The taste was similar but with the oak fighting for prominence.