For everyone that has done a Flanders, I tried JZ Flanders with using the cal ale and then roselare. But after the pelicle form and dropped, which took about 1.5 years. It was not very sour. Has anyone used only the Roseleare yeast without cal ale and the results. I did not use a bucket but glass carboy with wood cubes.
Thanks
Erik
We did Jamil’s recipe with a straight pitch of Roseleare about 10 months ago. All 3 carboys have pellicles, and they smell great. we pulled a sample a few months back, and it had a good lactic sourness to it.
I have heard similar reports of the method you used not being sour enough. At this point, you may want to shelf the batch that isn’t that sour, make another and pitch straight roseleare, maybe with some lambic dregs, and let it go, then blend the two in 2016.
Realize that JZ’s method is designed to mimic a blended beer. We do pitch a little of our house yeast which is an English Strain a day then a day or so later pitch our wild/wsour blend.
I always tell people to just use the Roeslare blend by itself, if you find it to be too sour then you can easily brew up a batch of clean fermented beer with Cal Ale and blend it within a few weeks.
Unless you have a barrel, doing it with Roselare only is the way to go.
see this is what i don’t get. Won’t the fermented cal ale beer have sugars/dextrins that the cal ale can’t eat, but the bugs in the flanders can, resulting in bottle bombs when the two are blended?
It sounds like you are missing the acetic character. My best results have been from blending. My first attempts were too sour. I achieved the acetic sourness by aging in a carboy with plastic wrap on top so Oxygen could get in, but bad bugs and dust could not. This took a couple of months before it was ready to blend. I also put one in a keg and left the pressure release valve open for a year. Both came out tasty when blended with fresh beer and some beer aged on French Oak Chips. It had enough malt to balance the sour and oak/vanilla complexity that you would expect in a sour red. The only beer that I started with Roselare was aged in a barrel for about 3 years (It was a club brew.) It tasted great one month so we decided to keg it. It was acetone in a month. I had to dump it. I think just use a clean yeast on a lightly hopped beer and do the right things post fermentation. These beers also take a lot of patience.
Also, Roselare pitched directly from the pack, which is pretty mild, is a totally different animal from Roselare re-pitched, which can get super sour really quickly in my limited experience. Also, as I said above, the blend does behave differently depending on how much oxygen is available. Because of these facts, be very careful of advice you get from others with respect to using blends unless your process does things exactly the same.
I have had the same experience. Made JZ’s Flander’s Red by his method, but put it on a slurry from a previous (slowly souring) batch. I think I went ahead and bottled it after around 6 months or so. I’m sure it will continue to sour in the bottle as well.
