We have one of three carboys of flanders that is approaching 2 years old (we blended the other two and are serving now).
I was thinking of maxing out our 25 gallon mash tun to make as much wort for my faux pilsner (70% 2-row, 30% corn), dilute if needed, make some of the wort into the traditional faux pils/blonde (US-05 yeast), then taking 10 gallons or so, boiling on my smaller systems (due to boil kettle capacity issues), and use the dregs/cake from the 2-year old flanders to ferment that 10 gallons.
I guess my question is would this make a suitable wort for a sour (I really like the base beer fermented with sacc yeast). Worst case, I could steep some specialty grains, but the wort would primarily be 70% 2-row, 30% corn.
A 2-year old yeast cake shouldn’t have much sacch left, so it probably would get nice and sour quickly. Maybe mash high to leave some long-chain sugars for the bugs to play with over an extended period?
BTW, that sounds like an awesome idea!
[quote=“porkchop”]A 2-year old yeast cake shouldn’t have much sacch left, so it probably would get nice and sour quickly. Maybe mash high to leave some long-chain sugars for the bugs to play with over an extended period?
BTW, that sounds like an awesome idea![/quote]
Wow first response in 90+ views!
Thats a good point on the sacc yeast. I have a big slug of 6+ month old brett trois that I could maybe get going with a starter, and pitch into one carboy with the dregs, and ferment the other with pure dregs in case the ‘pure dregs’ one is too acetic.
Also a good point about the high mash. I will probably mash at my normal low temp (148) for the pils, but I could do a steep of that wort with some pre-gelatinized oats, flaked wheat and/or specialty grains to get some more dextrins in there.
[quote=“Pietro”] I have a big slug of 6+ month old brett trois that I could maybe get going with a starter, and pitch into one carboy with the dregs, and ferment the other with pure dregs in case the ‘pure dregs’ one is too acetic.
[/quote]
You mean sacch trois? :mrgreen: White Labs’ new name for it is kind of dumb, but it’s still an awesome yeast.
That’s a really good idea to split it up like that. It’ll give you something to blend down the road if either one is somewhat lacking. The all-dregs one will surely be more sour than the other, so you’ll have options!
Pietro, did you ever brew this? I’m going to transfer a flanders red off an ECY-02 yeast cake in a couple of months, and trying to decide what to put back on it.
We did, but I ended up creating a really high dextrin, complex (special B, carared, oats, etc.) wort on my 5G BIAB, then doing a no-hop boil to ‘cut’/blend with the pilsner wort and make it red (!). We ended up with about 9-10 gallons between two sour/wild carboys, pitched the old flanders cake and about 2 cups of sacc trois into each.
In your case, I would max out your mash tun, do a low-hop boil, then dilute down to 1.055-60 or so, split the wort and cake into two carboys, and maybe pitch some Brett B or Brett C into one, with pure flanders slurry in the other. You can always blend later.
That’s a good idea! I was thinking of using mostly pils with some spelt and maybe GNOs for some complexity, hopping to around 20IBUs to slow down the lacto in the blend, and letting the pedio do most of the souring over the long run. The lacto in East Coast blends seems pretty aggressive.
The batch in there now is a little darker than I’d like, so I’m thinking of racking it to a carboy, fermenting something light on the yeast cake, and blending the two later, maybe with a portion of each left unblended just for comparison.
