Sour Barrel Ver. 6 (Oatmeal Sour)

Lately I feel like I’ve only been writing about my failures during brewing. The last few beers have not turned out exactly how I would have preferred. They are not bad, just not what I wanted. I guess it’s not too much of a bad thing to have high standards.  The issues I’ve had have come from my clean beers not from my sours. I need to get around to reviewing two of my fruited sours, which both turned out very well. 

What messed up this time had nothing to do with potential cross contamination, but completely forgetting I was going to brew an 8 gallon batch and not adjusting my base grain accordingly. I swear I know how to brew haha. It’s my attention to detail that lacks. I got up in the morning and went into autopilot mode setting up everything for 5 gallons, water, and grain, everything like normal. I couldn’t figure out why my gravity was coming in low, until I realized that I intended to make 8 gallons instead of 5 gallons, so I went back to check my calculations. I had everything set up for 5 gallons, so I was just under efficient for 5 gallons, but then I realized I also added oats for 8 gallons instead of 5 gallons. In retrospect I decided to add far too many oats for an 8 gallon batch, but it was definitely too much for 5 gallons. I wanted to add some flaked oats like I did for my Bernice clone to give it some softness to the body, but I over did it for sure. 

I plan on using this beer as an experiment. It will be sour because it’s in my barrel, but I’m going to find out what happens if you have a larger portion of flaked oats in your grain bill. I’m talking large like an oatmeal stout amount. I may need to rack it into a carboy so that I can give Brett time without being exposed to as much O2 as my barrel would normally infuse, but I will see when I taste it in the future.  Some of the things I did change from my last few barrel fills was to increase the IBUs a bit to hopefully keep the lacto at bay and allow for a longer and slower fermentation. 

Beer Stats

Batch size: 5.5 Gallons

Boil time: 60 mins

Estimated OG: 1.056

Measured OG: 1.048

Measured FG:

ABV:

SRM: 4.7

IBU: 36

Grain Bill

5lbs - Pilsner Malt

3lbs – Pale 2-row Malt

2lbs – Flaked Oats

3lbs – Vienna Malt

Hop Schedule

60 minutes – Magnum – 1oz

Mash Schedule

148^oF - Single Infusion – 70 minutes

156 ^oF – Infusion – 20 minutes

Yeast

Barrel leftovers

Notes:

8/11/15 – Brewed by myself. All issues have been documented above. Added 3 grams of CaCl and 1 gram of Gypsum for pH adjustments. During the boil I racked the previous barrel batch onto 7lbs of fresh blueberries and left all yeast behind and didn’t clean the barrel. 

8/13/15 – Signs of fermentation have started.

12/12/15 - Racked to carboy and added 7lbs of frozen Fredricksburg peaches.

2/17/16 - Bottle slightly over 4 gallons with 130 grams of table sugar.