Beer Forum

I'm looking at brewing a sasion this weekend, splitting the 5 gallon batch, and souring half of it (WL Belgian Sour Mix). I plan on bottleing the sour batch, and the carboy is glass, so as not to spread those delicious bacteria. I have never done a sour before, and wondering if there is anything I'm missing? I plan on adding corriander, Orange peel zest, and maybe some peppercorn to the secondary's.
Also is there a way to do a split batch on Beersmith?

Keep your plastic parts separate, so when you go to bottle, you'll want a sour beer racking/siphoning set up and bottling bucket, etc. As for split batches on BS, you can set it up as a 2.5 gallon batch and divide your ingredients between two recipe tabs, or leave it as one 5 gal batch and write in the notes tab for that recipe what you did to split it and ferment separately.

Thank you sir. Also will the sour beer act like a normal sasion as far as the need to age it, or will it be ready when the FG is hit? I usually crash cool all my beers for a 3-7 days.

Since the bugs may be able to finish out more things than your regular yeast, you may have a lower FG... it's done when it's done, and they typically develop more sour character over time.

Your FG could be .05 or lower. Because of the bug mix, the ferment will take a bit longer than a standard. You won't want to hear this, but I would take a very careful reading once a month to determine when you have hit FG (no bottle bombs). This will take months instead of weeks. But on the up side, you can take a gallon of every batch and see what souring does for it. I have my first wee heavy that I will add jolly pumpkin dregs to a gallon of just to see what happens.

Depending on how low your saison yeast takes your beer before souring you are going to want to give the sour half at least 3-4 mos before even tasting it. You might notice a pellicle forming on top of the beer in your carboy. This forms from the brett/bacteria in response to oxygen available in the headspace (it helps to protect the beer a bit).

Since a saison yeast can typically finish in the single digits (with proper mash temps and recipe formulation, and temp control) you might not need to let the sour mix go as long as other beers. As I said above I would give it at least 3-4 mos before taking a taste. If the beer is below 1.005 or so, then you can go ahead and bottle it keeping in mind with carbonation levels that they might increase over time as the blend continues to eat away at any remaining sugars.

You can read my simple Cross Contamination Test on Brett and Carboys...

Also this recipe was based of Mad Fermenationist website. I started it last Nov and just bottled it a couple weeks ago. Hand down the best sour saison I've ever had.

Farmhouse Saison of out Rayon Vert Brett Dregs.