Brewed a Flanders Red with Roeselare and dregs from 4 different beers. 2.5 months later, the gravity is 1.005 and it has this wonderful medium tart, bright flavor. Given the low gravity, it seems perfectly acceptable to bottle at this point. Forgive my ignorance, but can I ask why the homebrew community is obsessed with the notion that a sour beer must sit in your closet for over a year before it's worth drinking? If a brewery like Jester King can turn around a sour beer in a few months, why not us? I understand it might develop additional complexity, but is the payoff really worth sitting on it for so long? Is bottle conditioned sour beer objectively worse than beer aged in a carboy (assuming the gravity is below 1.01 and you're not at a high risk of bottle bombs)? Full disclosure, we are bottling this batch because the friend I brewed it with is moving cross country. I probably would not have even thought of it or taken a gravity reading otherwise.
I was thinking of Foudreweizen, specifically. It was brewed in January, bottled in March, and released in May.
It doesn't have to sit in the fermenter for a year. However, at 2.5 months the pedio and brett haven't finished their work. I bottle this type of beer after 6 months with good results. Given the current FG, you are probably safe to bottle. I have no idea how this will impact the beer compared to leaving it in the fermenter longer. A sour beer that uses lacto and no pedio or brett can be done in less than a month, so not all sour beer requires extended aging.
@Brew_Betty is on point regarding lacto. If you kettle sour or sour mash you can bottle your sour just like a regular beer. Once brett and pedio come in it complicates things. My last sour (only sour) was innoculated with lacto and allowed to sour prior to pitching sacc and brett. At 1mo it was so sour I split what I had and blended in straight wit and let it all sit for a couple months. Came out great, but I was letting the brett clean up some diacetyl that was present along with some possible butyric acid. Nothing worse than blue cheese beer. Now it taste like pineapple.
Love sour worting for this exact reason - super quick turnaround time. The lacto is definitely more one-dimensional compared to brett or pedio though, but it makes for a damn good berliner that's ready in a month or so. You could also add brett to a sour worted beer at bottling, and see how it develops over time in the bottle. Granted your FG is low enough to add brett and priming sugar in the bottle..
A sour can be made in a month or two, sure. Something like a complex lambic or wild ale with tons of funk and balanced sourness on the other hand? It takes a while... We have a lot of breweries here in MN that are jumping into sours and using sour worting/mashing to get sours cranked out quick and they are all very one-dimensional right now. Nothing like what we taste from long-time sour producers, not even close. I had a kriek that didn't turn the corner until it was 25 months old - it just needed time. Recently kegged a brew I call 'The Embodiment of Funk' that didn't taste up to my standard until over 2 years as well (it's outstanding now). I nearly tossed it out after 6 months thinking it was a lost cause.
I can brew a low gravity wheat beer, finish it in a week, and sour it in the bottling bucket with food grade lactic acid. Sort of the opposite of sour worting, which is now popular. So, nobody really doubts that you can make something that is just sour pretty quick. But most of us who are trying to make good sours are looking for much more of the complex flavors and not just the sour bite that many of those beers also have. So that's one part of it. The other part, related to the first, is that many of our sour beers are mixed fermentations that use very slow-acting, but very persistent and ultimately very effective cultures that behave differently from what we call "clean" yeast. We call them "bugs" because they are different from saccharomyces cerevisiae. You bottle too quickly at your own peril with something that can be actively dropping the gravity of your wort for as long as there is anything whatsoever in there that the cultures can consume. Using different bugs is how some of us achieve really interesting flavors, and the price of admission to the funky party is having a significantly different pace of fermentation from clean beers, with no getting around that.
Thanks for the responses, all. I am aware of kettle souring, but my original post was specifically referring to beers soured the "normal" way of introducing bugs other than lacto. I should have been more clear.
I'm planning on brewing a "faster" sour later this month by co-pitching Gigayeast's lactobacillus and one of Omega Yeast's Brett blends. Will it be as complex as a Cantillon or Drie Fonteinen gueuze? Almost certainly not, but it should yield a sour, somewhat interesting beer after a couple of months. Depending on how it turns out, I'll either rack it onto some fruit or dry hop it. Has anyone else brewed something similar?
I soured a wit with lacto, pitched a few strains of brett, and let it ride for 3 months. It was super sour, so I blended it with another wit I had brewed and let that ride a couple months. I dryhopped it with nelson, and its pretty tasty.
