I am getting married in August and our wedding venue has said that I can bring some of my homebrew and they will serve it at the wedding. My fiance likes sour beers, so I bought the Mad Fermentationist saison blend from Bootleg Biology and plan on doing a tart saison with it. I have a wild sumac tree in my backyard and I thought it may be nice to use some of that in the beer. I have been told that people make teas and lemonades with sumac and that it has a bit of a tart taste to it, so I thought it may go very well in this type of beer. I plan on secondarying on the sumac. Before I do this, I have a few questions: 1. Is there anyone here who has brewed with sumac before and can give me a bit of an idea of how much to use for a 5 gallon batch? 2. What's the best way to ensure the sumac is properly sanitized? Freeze it or use my sous vide to pasteurize it? 3. I also thought about adding the dregs of either some Cantillon or some 3 Fonteinen to the secondary. Do you think this is a good idea or totally superfluous? 4. I have also contemplated adding some oak to the secondary (possibly a spiral or some cubes). However, I'm a little iffy on how the oak will mix with the other flavors. Do you think this would be a good or bad idea? Thanks for the input everyone!
[Edited to add: Congratulations!] I've never brewed with sumac, so I can't help you there. But I want to point out to you that the Mad Fermentationist saison blend is not meant to be a sour blend. It is presumably more oriented toward funkiness. It's true that it includes a lactobacillus strain, and without hops maybe it would get a bit more tart than the ~3.9 pH that @OldSock reports. But if you want a significantly sour beer, I think you're going to need other microbes to get the job done (that is, microbes not included in the blend). I don't know about gueuze dregs—I've never brewed with them. They might work, but they might be too slow for your purposes. A more aggressive lacto strain might work, but again, you would probably need to keep hopping to a minimum. I personally would stay away from oak for this beer, but that is a subjective thing.
If you want real acidity from the blend I'd suggest pitching a starter of Lacto along with the blend and keeping IBUs really low. As the other poster suggested tartness is all the blend usually produces. Recently had a nice sumac sour from Scratch. They have a recipe for it in the Homebrewer's Almanac (although I don't remember the amounts/timing off-hand). I wouldn't worry about sanitizing the berries, given all the microbes in the blend and the high attenuation, I doubt you'd get anything negative from the wild yeast. Given that you want the beer ready by August, I'd skip the dregs as Pedio could cause issues in the short term (by all means divert a gallon, pitch dregs too to up the acidity, and have it for your first anniversary!). Personally I'd either skip the oak or go very light, tannins can overwhelm a really dry saison, again a few cubes for the long aged beer perhaps?
Thanks for the ideas. I'm looking to just go a little tart with this one because I want it to still be accessible to the people at the wedding who are not very into craft beers or sours (which is the vast majority of the people attending), so I think this yeast and the sumac will be good for that. Thanks!
