So after 2 successes and 1 failure trying to make sours using commercial bugs, I decided to try my hand at a true "wild" ferment using yeast and bacteria off some homegrown fruit that I got from someone through work (in this case, peaches). The base beer was pale and deliberately fairly neutral - OG was about 1.050 iirc. I added the peaches (~3 lbs per Gal), put a lid on it, and waited. It grew a great pellicle, started smelling funky (but never bad), and churned away for ~6 months. I took a small sample, and was surprised that the SG was hovering at 1.012 - much higher than I would expect for something that I assume was full of Brett etc, and so put the lid back on and left it for another ~6 months. Fast forward until recently, where I took another sample & found no change to the SG at all. It tasted good (a tad tropical, a bit funky, good peach flavour, although not very sour), so I added some fresh yeast, bottled up, and waited ~1 month for it to carb. I opened the test bottle the other day, and the beer has really changed it's profile... It now has quite a strong and pungent "Blue Cheese" sort of aroma, although it doesn't carry through to the taste at all. The taste is still funky, but with the funk profile more earthy and a tad "savoury"(?) rather than fruity. The peaches are definitely showing through, although not as strong as desired. If I wasn't making it myself, I would swear it was a different beer! Overall, this is quite a distinct and odd beer, not one that is bad as such, just... different... and a tad off-putting... My wife hates it (because of the smell), but aside from that, the flavour actually a bit too mild for what I wanted. We shall see how/if it develops more in the bottle... Reading up on the "blue cheese" smell, it seems like this isn't necessarily uncommon for wild ales, but probably wont go away? I'm just weirded out that it appeared so suddenly.
Butyric acid comes across as vomit or cheese, brett turns it into pineapple esters. Let em ride a few months and revisit. Good luck.
Ah thanks, will do... Definitely not vomit, it is almost identical to a strong blue cheese. As I am not a huge blue-cheese fan, hopefully it dissipates a bit!
We have a fig tree that will probably give us close to 100 figs this year (minus however many the birds eat)... So good idea!
