Long Term Fermentation Projects

I have decided to do two, very ambitious, long term projects, side by side. Both involve spontaneous fermentation and a 3+ year turnaround. Every 6 months, for the next 3 years, I am going to brew a wild red Ale and a Lambic, and spontaneously ferment every batch. In 3 years, I will have enough volume of various aging to do blending.

I am choosing March and October for the brew months, since March is when everything is starting to bloom, and October is when everything is starting to rot. Both months still allow cool enough nights to allow the beer to cool naturally in a timely fashion.

For the Lambic, the exciting part is that I will potentially wind up with a number of different beers.
- Geuze (Lambic blend of 1-3 year old lambics)
- Fruit Lambic (think Kreik, Framboise, Blackberry (Mure?), Aprictot, Peche, Fraise, you name it!)
- regular Lambic

I plan to steal 1/4 to 1/2 of every Lambic batch after every year and make a fruit lambic out of it. The other 1/2 to 3/4 will go on to aging, or a portion will be stolen to go as a regular lambic, if it lives well enough on its own.

For the wild red ale, well....I will wind up with a wild red ale! Think Rodenbach, just minus the foeder, and minus the pitching of yeast. Oh, and minus the whole Belgium thing :)

Speaking of oak wood and barrels......it is just not feasible to do this project with barrels. Fortunately! you can still oak a beer in a plastic or glass fermentation vessel by using oak staves or oak chips that have been severely denatured in strength.

For now, I have some time before I need to think about oaking. I think my plan is to take whatever form of oak and doing a rinse and repeat of boiling the wood then sticking it into high strength ethanol until the oak character is knocked down. I don't want to over oak my beer in 3 weeks after waiting so long to ferment and blend it.

It will be interesting to see if any trends form over the 3 year period, such as is there common ground amongst the March beers vs the October beers? Do only certain microbes come out in larger amounts in March vs October? Exciting things to find out!

One of this big missions for this project is to explore a new area for me in booze making: Blending.

I am telling myself right now that every batch I make will come out different, and not every batch is going to come out perfect. I repeat, NOT EVERY BATCH IS GOING TO COME OUT PERFECT!

That is why blending is so great. You take a little bit of this batch, to a little bit of this batch, and voila! You have the perfect batch! Or so we hope...

Cheers!