Final prep before barrel gets filled.

The yeast has arrived:

A box from East Coast Yeast arrived today!  1 liter of "Levi Funk Lambic Blend".













The barrel has been primed:

You can kind of  see a white film on the wood.  That's the Cantillon yeast.









And the 1" siphon has been cleaned:

A 1 inch tube with a shut off valve.  It will be submerged and filled with wort from the bed of a truck outside my house.  Then, closing the valve, I will be able to fish the 20' of tube to the barrel in the basement.  Open the valve and a siphoning action will start and fill the barrel!

Stacking the Deck...

Spontaneous fermentation is achieved by exposing the wort to the air. Everywhere around the world there is yeast and bacteria in the air, so why does spontaneous fermentation seem to only work in Belgium? Some believe the ambient air in Belgium has more good yeast/bacteria in it that undesirable microbes.  While this may be true, the brewers of Belgium also have had hundreds of years to refine their barrels.  After a beer sits in a coolship to pick up some ambient yeast, it is then put into a barrel to ferment.  That barrel had been used to previously age lambic, so there are plenty of resident microbes to guide the fermentation process.  If a barrel did not produce good lambic, they would throw it out (or burn it to heat the brewery).

Here, we have not been doing this for hundreds of years.  We can still open the beer up to the wilds of the air, but for my first barrel I want to emulate the effects of the barrel already having aged lambic.

To do this, I am basically diluting desired yeast with water and adding it to the barrel (see follow up post).  The oak will absorb the water and the yeast will become resident to the barrel.  I will be priming with the Cantillon Gueuze culture I built up and will now wash.  I siphoned off the beer until just the yeast cake at the bottom was left.  Give that a good swirl and dump it into a growler.  After the growler sat in the fridge for a few minutes it had already started to settle.

Since this yeast is not left over from a complete brew cycle, there will be no hops sediment at the bottom, and I don't expect to have much of a protein build up.  I am going to work under the assumption that what I have is nearly all yeast, so my efforts here are not to separate out the yeast, but rather concentrate it and remove the "beer" from it.

I let that sit over night to further settle, and then siphoned off the liquid on top.   With a concentration of yeast left, I added water that had been boiled and cooled.  I will let this settle (if necessary siphoning of the liquid on top) and add this to some water.  That diluted yeast mixture will then be poured into the barrel and rolled around to coat the walls.

Cantillon Turbid Mash

For those of you looking to brew a traditional lambic, I found a "recipe" for Cantillon's Turbid mash.  http://bergsman.org/jeremy/lambic/making.html

I've converted it from Metric to English and scaled down to a 10 gallon batch.

                Malt - 9.5 lbs
                Wheat - 5 lbs
                      |
1.2 gallons           |
H2O @ 144F -->It takes 15 to 20 min. to
              mix all the grain and H2O.
              This results in mash
              temperature of 113F.
                      |
              mash held at 113F for
              10 min.
                      |
H2O @ 212F -->In ~6 min. enough H2O (.75 gallons)
              is added to bring the
              mash to 136F
                      |
              In ~5 min. 0.4 gallons is
              transferred to kettle #2 ---------------->|
                      |                               0.4 gallons in kettle #2
H2O @ 212F -->In ~10 min. enough H2O (.75 gallons)    is heated.  during
              is added to bring the                   the heating it never
              mash to 149F                            reaches 212F
                      |                                 |
              In ~35 min. 1.6 gallons is                |
              transferred to kettle #2 ---------------->|
                      |                               an additional 1.6 gallons
H2O @ 212F -->In ~10 min. enough H2O (1.3 gallons)    is added to kettle #2
              is added to bring the                   and the heating of this
              mash to 162F                            kettle continues.  it
                      |                               never reaches 212F
              mash held at 162F for                     |
              20 min.                                   |
                      |                                 |
                      +----> first runnings (2 gallons) |
                             to kettle #1.  begin       |
                             heating of this kettle     |
                             for the boil               |
                                                        |
                                                 transfer the contents
                                                 of kettle #2 back to
                      |<-------------------------the mash tun. At this
                      |                          time the contents of
              the mash is now                    this kettle has reached 176F
              at 167F                           
                      |
              mash held at 167F for
              20 min.
                      |
              recirculate the wort
              in the mash tun to
              clarify.
                      |
              sparge with 9 gallons of 185F H2O
                      |
              split wort between the
              two kettles as it runs off.
              kettle #1 will contain 8.67 gallons
              total (including the 2 gallons
              previously put there)  kettle #2
              will contain 4.33 gallons total.
                      |
              add 3.75 ounces aged hops to kettle #1
              only.  heat both kettles to boiling
              and allow the volume to be reduced
              by nearly 25% to yield a full batch size
              of 10 gallons total between the two
              kettles.  The contents of the two
              kettles are blended together before
              cooling overnight.