This is a blend of two beers, refermented with grape juice concentrate from a 1-gallon winemaking kit.
The first beer is a Flanders red–style ale. Mash 60 min. at 152°F (67°C). The only hop addition is 2 oz. of low-alpha Strisselspalt at 60 min. Chill to pitching temperature of about 70°F (21°C), and pitch House and/or Roeselare blend of microbes. Primary 30 days in an HDPE container. (Some natural oxygen ingress through the HDPE during primary is desirable for the style.) Secondary at least 6 months, or as much as 18 months in stainless steel.
Mash: You can alter the mash temperature higher or lower. Because this recipe calls for a blend of Saccharomyces, Brettanomyces, Lactobacillus, and Pediococcus, all sugars will be metabolized in time. A lower mash temperature will mean more easily digestible sugars for the Saccharomyces and a cleaner beer. A higher mash temperature means more longer chain sugars and more influence from the non-Saccharomyces microbes.
Hops: You can use different hops, as Strisselspalt is not always available. I recommend a variety with a floral or herbal aroma, and keep the IBUs around 10. More IBUs than that may inhibit Lactobacillus, which is the primary souring microbe.
Microbes: My Flanders red lives in a 10-gallon stainless steel keg, which is a single-vessel solera. Every year, I remove 5 gal. from the tank to blend into a final product and replace the removed volume with 5 gal. of new beer I make after I let it primary in the HDPE. (Let the microbes settle in primary and rack; you don’t want the yeast cake in the solera keg to increase every year).
The microbes in my solera are a house blend that gets more complicated with each yearly cycle. At this point, it includes wild-caught yeast, which I isolated from a homebrewed, spontaneously fermented lambic-style ale; commercial blends from various yeast labs; and bottle dregs from commercial sours and wild ales. If you use bottle dregs, make sure they aren’t from breweries that pasteurize or use a killer strain to bottle condition. The Milk the Funk Wiki has a list of breweries whose bottles have good dregs for this purpose.
I recommend a solera, as the product you will have for blending becomes fractionally more mature and complex each year. I am on year 5 of my solera, and in my opinion the product now rivals my favorite commercial sour ales. However, you don’t need a solera to make a great sour. My favorite commercial blend for this style is Roeselare Blend from Wyeast. I have made great beers with this blend alone, but it does take time to mature.
After a long time maturing, the Flanders red may become too sour to be enjoyable on its own, so I blend it with a second “clean” beer to cut the acidity, and reintroduce some malt backbone, sweetness, and complexity.
The second beer this year was a saison. My brew club friend Mark Pennick had a simple house saison that had just finished primary fermentation. Mark has won NHC gold in the past for his specialty saison. He gave me 2.5 gal. of his basic saison. He says:
In a grain bag, steep specialty grains in 158°F (70°C) water. Use a 10-gallon kettle with enough room for full volume boil of extract. Pre-boil volume of 7.5 gal. (28.4 L) to make 6.5 gal. (24.6 L). Hop per schedule. Pitch 1 L starter of WLP568 to have at least 265 million cells. Pitch at 72°F (22°C) and hold at that temperature for at least 10 days, maybe up to 14 days.
I pasteurized the Flanders red because I didn’t want those microbes to sour the clean saison addition. I heated the red to 135°F (57°C) and held for 30 min. I then chilled it to 70°F (21°C) and blended it with the saison. We sampled different blending ratios and liked 1:1 the most.
I had some Cabernet Sauvignon grape juice concentrate from a 1-gallon wine kit I had never made and decided to experiment. I added the 1.32-liter bag of concentrate to referment the blended beer. After it was done, I added priming sugar to achieve about 2 vol. (4 5/L) of CO2 and bottled. Let the bottles condition for at least a month, but longer is better.
Crafting sours is more of an art than a science. You can alter many of these steps and make an exceptional product. Don’t be afraid to taste test over time, experiment with something new, and change course as you go.
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