Wild Brewing Pale Sour Ale

6/15

The calm before the storm.

Tomorrow will be the first brew day for Wild Brewing. The plan is to brew a rather simple Pale Sour Ale. If everything goes perfectly 1 year from tomorrow a magnificent beer will finally be ready for drinking. We will be following a rather simple recipe of 90% pale malt and 10% carahell. The wort will be lightly hopped to 24 IBUs with 10 ounces of Halleratu hops.

Other than getting together the equipment the biggest challenge is getting enough yeast ready to ferment 30 gallons of beer. You would need to pitch at least 6 smack packs from wyeast to have enough microorganisms to bring the batch to completion. Instead of purchasing so many packages of yeast I have been using a stir plate and a 2 gallon fermentor to grow yeast. Hopefully by tomorrow afternoon I will have turned 2 packages of Roselare yeast into a slurry large enough for our beer. In the future we will be using the yeast cake from the previous fermentation for the following batch. I will also be adding some other cultures to the fermentor as I get them ready. They will include cultures from the dregs of a few Russian River beers, New Belgian beers, and some pure cultures of Brett and Lacto. The variety of bugs should help make the finished profile more complex. In addition, the cake will change over time as some species are better able to establish themselves. In order to help create balance I will be adding a new package of cultured Roselare each time to help ensure that everyone is getting a fair shot at helping make these beers great!