So I’m trying to do a better job at documenting my brewing. As you can remember, I recently tried a sour brown ale. I have been tempted to try my own. I finally broke down and brewed a batch. My goal was to make a seven gallon batch and put two gallons to be fermented spontaneously outside, and the other five gallons to be fermented with Roselare yeast from Wyeast.

The recipe is as follows:

7 lbs of American Pilsen malt 6 lbs of Munich malt 8 oz of Belgium Special B 4 oz of roasted barley 1 lb of dark candi sugar 1 oz of German Perle hops

Since I used a large amount of Pilsen malt I decided to do a protein rest. I ended up mashing with 3.5 gallons at 130 degrees (I was aiming for 120) and than adding 2.5 gallons of 200 degree water after half hour. The temperature seemed to stabilize at 150 degrees. I mashed for 1 hour before sparging. I let the first running drain before sparging with 6 gallons of water. I ended up with about 9 gallons of wort. My brew pot is only 10 gallons so I had to watch it like a hawk for boil overs. After half an hour of boiling I added the one and only hop addition of Perle hops. I let it boil for another hour and a half before cooling down.

Unfortunately my Wyeast bag did not inflate. I am giving it till Wednesday to start bubbling in my fermentor. I probably will use ordinary Lambic yeast instead of Roselare since the local brewing store does not seem to have any. For the wild yeast I took a bucket and wrapped some cheese cloth over the top. This id tricky since I have to monitor the weather and bring it inside and cover it when it rains (it’s gonna rain tonight). It will be interesting to compare my sour brown in a year with the cultivated yeast versus the wild yeast of Sunderland.