Oude Bruin - Experiment in Blending

brewing

Edinburgh Brew Co-op visited Belgium last month to take part in the world’s possibly - per their own admission - most obscure beer festival: The Festival of Spontaneous Fermentation. A more detailed write up of this event, along with some pictures, is soon to follow. An Oude Bruin, of which we sampled a few at the festival, is a sour brown ale whose complex flavours are achieved, like many styles from this region, through an inexact process by which the wort is left for a time exposed with the aim that a smorgasbord of different local yeasts and bacteria will settle down and begin to multiply. This is perhaps not something we can reliably achieve outwith an old Belgian atticspace and its accompanying air but our aim is to approximate these flavour combinations by splitting our wort up so we can eventually blend the results of different processes. Around 4L of the wort gets some various bottle dregs added to it from beers we like, including dregs from a bottle brought back with us for hopefully a bit of authenticity.

Without further ado, our recipe today is as follows:

Grain Bill

Mashed at 68°C for 60 minutes with the following:

  • 3.4kg Pale 2-Row Malt
  • 1kg Brown Malt
  • 0.3kg Dark Crystal
  • 0.25kg Aromatic Malt
  • 0.25kg Golden Naked Oats

After mash sparged up to a bit over 23l.

Boil/Splitting the Goods

At point of boil, split 8L from the pot to be soured for a few days by Lactobacillus Delbrueckii.

Boiled the remainder for 90 minutes.

Our first plan was to use Galena, possibly Colombus hops. But as luck would have it, our Brewstore were selling 4 year and very pungent Fuggles; aged in store having been acquired after the closure of another homebrew shop in town some years ago. 36 grams was added to the remainder at 60 minutes. At 30 minutes, another 30 grams.

After separating into 3 demijohns:

  • The dregs of a Strawberry Lambik (Hansson’s), WildBeer’s summer 2015 Blend, and a small bottle of Cantillon (Raspberry): added to ~4L
  • French Saison yeast, taken from our own ongoing batch of Scotlandsdricka: added to ~4L
  • Flemish Ale Blend yeast, again taken from last week’s Scotlandsdricka: added to ~4L

Original Gravity

OG 1.059 (hope to end: 1.010)

But Wait

Will moniter this experiment over the next few months and report back the results.

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Oude Bruin - Experiment in Blending by Edinburgh Brewing Cooperative is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.