Beer stuff

Oh the many and varied crazy tidbits of beer things that I've got going on.  For some reason I've got micro-batch fever, and am cooking two 1 gallon batches and two 1/2 gallon batches of various bits of beer.

First up is the rehashing of my failure of a vanilla bourbon robust porter, for those that have been following for a long time and forgotten or if you're new here you can read the whole sordid affair over here in 1, 2, 3 easy steps.  Short version for the TL;DR crowd I fucked up a big beer that cost quite a bit of money.  I've let it sit in bottles for the last year (I'm surprised it was a year ago as well!) and while cleaning up my basement I decided it was time to do something with this huge (10%ABV) but largely undrinkable beer.  I poured out enough to get a gallon (with some head space) and racked some of the pale sour ale that is sitting on a lambic blend for a few days.  The FG on this beer was 1.026 so there was still a ton of sugar for those little yeasties to work on, but thus far I find the labmic blend to be giving me a very vinegary flavor profile.  I found a New Belgium LOF Bretta Beer that I had intended to pour the dregs of into this gallon of beer, turns out they are choosing to pasteurize the beer to make it more consistent (which likely killed the yeast making it not a good idea to re-pitch).  Plan b, that has thus far turned out to be an amazing choice was Wyeast's Brettanomyces.  I'm going to call this super Brett given the already high attenuation and how hard this thing is still fermenting 5 days later.  I love watching the tiny bubbles trickle up the sides of this fermentation vessel, and slightly excited about this beer.  I think the soured version is going to hide a lot of the flaws I found in this beer.  Below is a picture of me degassing the beer after I'd poured it into the gallon jug.

Up next I brewed a microbatch of an Oatmeal stout (I'm thinking ahead for the fall) the Recipe was pretty simple and just Brew in a bag style so easy to replicate and scale up if you're interested.  I bumped the OG with 1lb of dark dried malt extract, coming in at a respectable 8%abv.  Since I racked to secondary on some vanilla beans it's been needing to be agitated every few hours, but the fermentation thus far isn't "stuck" so I'm hoping it will fully attenuate without me having to build up another yeast colony for repitching.

And last but certainly not least I did a soured lite version of the Oatmeal Stout.  I don't have a recipe for the sour versions of beers typically because it's the same as whatever I did for the full strength version just reusing the grains.  By the math I did I was only about 55% efficent on my grains for the heavy batch so there was plenty of sugar left over to do a small batch with the grains and fresh oatmeal.  I cannot seem to find my notes on what the OG for the small batch was, may not matter it got blended with the rest of my Labmic blend that was sitting on a pale ale, but I thought it was north of 1.014.  I bumped it a little bit with 1/4 cup white sugar and 1 tablespoon of molasses, I don't know what it would have ended up as that way so whatever!  After 8 days I also poured a little bit of the wyeast super brett in here to really get the sour party working.