Sours

Not by end of summer. End of next summer, maybe.

If you want a quick turn around Flander's Reddish beer, you could always dissolve Munich Extract in warm water, use the sour wort technique in the Berlinerweisse thread, boil and add some Dark Candi Syrup, then ferment with a Saison yeast, add a dose of vinegar to taste at bottling. If FG is below 1.006, add a couple Brett strains at bottling with your priming sugar and keep warm in your garage. You might have a sour, malty, lightly vinegary, dark fruity, slightly Bretty, Belgiany beer by September... but it aint a Flander's Red.

Personally I wouldn't brew this. I would just do the Berliner from the thread and drink it in a few weeks, maybe do a few back to back, and add fruit to some, and work a real Flander's Red into the mix to age on some oak with dregs until next Summer.

 

As far as doing some research for making a sour well, start reading:

Mad Fermentationist
Embrace The Funk
Ryan Brews
Spontaneous Funk
Fermentologist
End of Silence (yes, that one is mine)

Take some of the information and wisdom and put it to work with a few recipes. While you wait for them to age buy these and take notes (tons of great info in there):

American Sour Beers
Wild Brews

 

Shameless self-plug! Haha, I enjoy your blog jbaka. Bear Flavored Ales is another good blog for some funky reads.

 

Not exactly shameless, I went back and forth on whether to include mine on there. Decided to toss it in there at the bottom as I have drawn info from all those other bloggers that have influenced my sour brewing, one more than others, but I think we all know that since he wrote the book on it .

 

So I hesitate to mention this, because I harbor serious doubts about whether the claims are true, but here is what Wyeast says about its 3203-PC "De Bom Sour Blend" (which is available July through September) (emphasis added):

Beer Styles: Lambic, Geuze, Flanders Red Ale, American Sour Ale
Profile: Wyeast’s QC Manager and World’s Tallest Microbiologist Greg Doss developed De Bom to create authentic Old- and New-World sour ale profiles but in a fraction of the time required by previous, less manly cultures. For best results, we recommend the following: no O2/aeration at beginning of fermentation; periodic dosing with O2 during fermentation to stimulate ethyl acetate production; frequent sampling to monitor development and complexity. Under optimum conditions, beers can be ready for consumption in 1-2 months.​

Alc. Tolerance 10% ABV
Flocculation variable
Attenuation 75-85%
Temp. Range 80-85°F (26-29°C)
​

So if you choose to believe Wyeast's claim, and if you can brew right away (and/or you have a somewhat forgiving conception of when summer ends), then this yeast could do the trick for you. I have never brewed a Flanders Red, but the recipe that Jamil suggests in Brewing Classic Styles looks good to me. I would just pitch the blend, not any clean yeast. And given the suggested temperature range, I would think about how to achieve consistent, high temperatures (some people put the carboy into a tub, fill the tub with water, and then use an aquarium heater to achieve a consistent, warm temperature).

All of that said, I agree with @jbakajust1 that a Berliner probably makes more sense for you. Flanders Red just isn't a style that lends itself to quick turnaround.

 

I've had great results with sour mash berliners, hell the first one was ready in 3 weeks.

 

Oh yeah, and re-reading the original post, I think a lot of people have had good experiences racking Berliners onto various kinds of fruit. Probably anything tart would work well. Raspberries, blackberries . . . maybe something like peaches or nectarines.

 

Lower levels of ethyl acetate are good and fruity, too much and you have nail polish remover and have to dump the beer. I'm not sure I would purposefully add O2 to a fermented beer knowing that O2 is the enemy of fermented beer.

I've heard that the ECY Bug County blends can do a 2-3 month sour that is good but lacks maturity, good luck finding them though.

Mango. Mine is on mango now.

 

Various fruit I've had in berliners that worked very well:
Blueberry
Blackberry
Raspberry
Tart Cherry
Starfruit
Passionfruit
Jasmine
Guava
Apricot

 

This is a good point, but bear in mind the aceto bugs will need at least a little oxygen to make a proper Flanders Red. Still, presumably you could get enough oxygen without any extreme measures like purposefully adding it.

 

So I know it's a long thread, but at least skim through this thread, which is the one @jbakajust1 was referring to. I don't know if it mentions doing an extract version, but I would think that you could do it. I would try to minimize pre-existing microbes, maybe by doing a quick boil (or hold the wort at pasteurization temperatures for a while), then cool back to room temperature and proceed with the sour-wort approach. I defer to others, though, I haven't done any of that stuff.

[Edited to add: It would be helpful if someone did a TL;DR summary of that thread. I confess I haven't read the thing start to finish, it is quite intimidating.]

 

I've only added fruit once but it worked extremely well this way:
3.2lbs of frozen raspberries from store. Thawed them, refroze them, then thawed them again, basically turned them into mush which is what I was after. Apparently freezing and unfreezing breaks down the cell walls.
My thinking was the freezing process done commercially would specifically attempt to avoid this so I thawed them and refroze them to be safe. Funneled them into my secondary 5 gallon carboy, racked my berliner onto it after primary fermentation was finished.

Left it on for a week then batch primed and bottled it all. The raspberries were just thrown in with no bag or anything, and they were basically pureed by the time it was finished, they also tend to float and turn white as the color is drained.
There was some raspberry matter left but most of it just poured right out. An overnight soak in PBW eliminated all residual raspberry matter.

When I bottled I didn't filter or anything, just used my auto-siphon to transfer the beer to my bottling bucket, it kept the majority of the raspberry matter out.

The fruit I said working well were all from the funky buddha's berliners for the most part. The jasmine was combined with guava in one, the rest were featured alone.
The apricot was based off cascade apricot which isn't a berliner but is pure lacto so I figured it's similar enough that it would probably be pretty damn tasty.

 

That thread is amazing, I basically owe thanks to FATC1TY for giving me the knowledge to make some awesome berliners.
Here is what I distilled from the monstrous thread:

• Tried and true method: Sour Mash (or wort), boil to kill bugs, ferment with clean yeast.
• Sour mash is faster when it's kept warmer, but will work fine without additional heat.
• Start the sour mash at 120F, try to keep it around 100-120 if you want to speed up souring process.
• Keeping oxygen out of the sour mash is imperative. Saran wrap over the mash works for me. I keep the whole thing in my brew pot while it sours and just lay santizied saran wrap right on top of the mash.
• A handful of unmilled grains generally yields a better sour than pure lacto. (don't remember if this was in this thread, or on something else, but I remember reading it somewhere)
• You can collect the wort after mashing and sour that instead of the whole mash, it doesn't hold temp as well but this is how FATC1TY does it and reports great results.
• Low PH will result in primary fermentation taking longer to get started. This is normal.

Also, I sanitize everything on mash day since it won't be boiled. I don't want anything except what is on my unmilled grains in that sour mash.

As a final note, the length of time you sour mash is up to you. The first one I made I tasted throughout the process and found that 5 days was great. I like my berliners very sour though.

 

So, for the benefit of the OP, here is a little bit of an elaboration of what @jivex5k is saying.

You are going to start by producing the wort, the same as if you did a mash. In your case, I suppose you will mix your wheat DME or LME or whatever into your water. Don't add hops yet. It appears that Briess "Bavarian Wheat" LME is 65% wheat malt and 35% barley malt. That would probably work, or you could add some pilsner DME or LME or whatever to bring the ratio more toward 50/50. Personally, I would do something to kill any microbes that might already be present. So for instance, you could bring it to a boil, or you could bring it to pasteurization temperatures for a while. Then let it cool down.

When it is at ~120°F, you are going to add a "handful" of grain (consult the thread for more precise suggestions), and you are going to take steps to keep oxygen out of the wort. I think some people add some seltzer water (not club soda). People might have recommendations, I haven't done it. Again, skim the thread maybe for suggestions. Then you are going to wait several days, keeping the wort warm if possible. What is going on is that the "good" bugs are reproducing and souring the wort, while the "bad" bugs (which create garbage or vomit flavors/aromas) are not doing much because there is no oxygen. The bad bugs can't deal with low pH, so once the good bugs have done their thing for a while, you are safe. After several days, the wort should be nice and sour. You can taste it to see how it is going. On the one hand, once you decide it is sour enough, that is as sour as it is going to get - the bugs are going to die when you boil it. On the other hand, at this point there is a lot of sugar in the wort, and this tends to hide the sourness to some degree. When the sugars have fermented out, the perceived acidity should be higher.

Okay so once you are ready, you are going to bring the whole thing to a boil with a very small amount of noble hops, and then you are going to ferment normally with a clean yeast, maybe something like US-05. From this point on, it is just like the clean beers you may have brewed, except that it happens to be sour. The bugs aren't going to survive the boil.

So that is what is going on, conceptually. Again, I highly recommend skimming the thread for suggestions. For all I know, there are tips on doing it with extract.

 

For your future sours, start here, then go to the other stuff I posted earlier:

http://www.homebrewersassociation.org/how-to-brew/6-tips-brew-sour-beers-mad-fermentationist/