Help brewing a Lambic

I think this is a good teaching scenario. I hope you don't mind if I dissect your procedure a bit.

Do you remember what your grist was? You don't mention a boil, so I'm assuming that you didn't boil or use hops. Would that be correct? If that is correct, they are a major source of phenolic precursors needed to make the end product "interesting", so leaving them out probably lead to the boring nature of your beer, but there certainly could have been other reasons.

There are a couple things here that are quite important. The ideal temperature for ambient inoculation is between 30 and 40 degrees F. That has to do with two reasons: 1) ambient microflora and 2) and more importantly time of cooling, with the time between 120F and 80F being the most important. A lot of breweries simply cool overnight, but I find that a time period of between 4 and 8 hours is sufficient, if you allow the beer to free fall from the boil.

I always find it interesting how quickly these fermentations can kick off with no lab microbes pitched. Just goes to show how surrounded we are with microbes, both wanted and unwanted.

As you've noted, it's important to be patient with these beers. That said, they can finish in a lot less time than this.

Again, I would wager that this reflects more on your recipe construction than anything else.

There really is no way to figure out if you have Brett in a beer outside of microscopic examination, but since your beer was POF-, I would actually assume that you didn't capture any Brettanomyces sp. in your effort. This, however, demonstrates the wisdom of traditional lambic brewers and the Methode Traditionelle. You only had one beer to sample. A beer that was inoculated and aged in plastic. If you had dozens of beers, that were all inoculated in a coolship and that were aged in wood and you could blend them, I'd bet dollars to donuts that your end product would have been a less boring one.

 

Oh . . . almost forgot, if you're using a brewpot or a bucket as a coolship, you can just put a muslin hopsock/grainbag over the vessel to keep stuff from falling into or flying into your wort.

 

I don't mind discussing this at all, that's why I posted it, to help others learn.

So, I don't remember the exact grain bill but I'm guessing it was mainly German Pilsner with a small amount of Munich thrown in. I may have had some Vienna malt in there as well, but as noted it was pretty basic. I generally try to keep things simple.

I did boil it, and I did hop it using some dried out old hops that were probably about 4 years old (Styrian Goldings if I recall correctly but they might have been EKGs). It was simply a first-wort boil addition to help coagulate proteins and what not. There would have been some bitterness coming out of it but not much. I don't recall the quantity or original alpha acids.

As for cooling, I cooled it to roughly 90-100F by whirlpooling it with the bucket in a cold water bath, and then placed it outside. It would have gotten colder at night but I'm not sure how close to 30 - 40 it would have gotten. Somewhere between 40 - 50 is more likely.

Brettanomyces - no, I don't believe I collected any. That, in my opinion, is what left the beer boring. It was soured but without character, similar to many of today's kettle-soured beers. I took a chance but it didn't work. Of course today you can simply buy and pitch what you want which makes it much easier.

And yes, I only had one beer to work with. I should probably have done more but it was at the time, around '95, still an experiment for me.This, however, is also an issue just for smaller breweries that only have a few barrels to age their beers in even when not souring. If they've only got a handful of barrels and they're not blending them off you tend to get a more simplistic beer that's not really that exciting. But with space and cost and everything else I completely understand it and applaud them for even trying.

 

Nuh-uh!
https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/35/1903/

 

Cool, man. Glad you're game.

Not a bad grist, at all. Munich usually adds to the phenolic nature of the beer, as well.

OK, cool. The hops, even though they were old, probably imparted enough hop related compounds to inhibit some unwanted microbes, like enterobacteriaceae, but weren't enough to impart a solid bitterness, which is a good thing. The inclusion of hops without a lot of phenolics in the finished beer is another reason to suspect that you didn't capture any Brettanomyces.

This is another pitfall. Cooling too quickly will result in less time in the optimum temperatures to collect microbes. Not saying this was THE issue with your beer, but it was probably one of them.

Better than taking no chance at all. The last sentence is important, though. Although you can certainly use ambient inoculation as the sole source of microbes, you can also use it to increase your microbial diversity by adding lab cultures to your wort after you've cooled it outside.

Agreed. That said, there are ways to get good complexity even in small programs. The issue, in my eyes, is that a lot of brewers think "This stuff isn't that hard. I can do this by myself." and don't consult other brewers who are in the know or even read enough source material to realize that they could do a lot better.