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!

Priming the Barrel

Yesterday I talked about what is meant by "priming the barrel".  My yeast had settled after being washed, so now its time to get to work.

As you can see the liquid on top is still beer-colored (but not nearly as dark as previous), so I siphoned that off.  Really there is no need to remove that liquid as I intend on diluting the yeast anyway, however there would be residual flavor from the DME, so its probably best to remove it.

I boiled ~3 gallons of water and then let it cool back to room temperature.  Using some of the water, I filled the growler, and shook up the yeast, and then emptied the growler into the pot of water.

Using a funnel, I emptied the pot of diluted yeast into the barrel.  Unfortunately I slipped a bit, and you can see I spilled some.  It looks a lot worse than it actually was.  I don't think more than a couple pints of liquid were spilled, but it made a mess.

Also, you can see the barrel is resting on a track of wood.  These are old pieces of timber I found in my basement, but they are almost identical to the size of railroad ties, which you could buy at any landscape/garden store.  I highly recommend doing this as it makes rolling the barrel much easier.







Its quite difficult to get the camera lens and a flashlight over the bung hole at the same time, but here are a couple pictures I got of the inside of the barrel.  (you can click on the images to enlarge them)

This one is from the top looking straight down right after filling the barrel.

This picture is from the side looking in after I had rotated the barrel a few times.  

The pictures are deceptive in that it looks like there is much more liquid inside than there actually is.  I will continue rotating the barrel throughout the week until all the liquid has been absorbed.

Update:  I realized 3 gallons was too much water, so I let the yeast settle in the barrel and poured out about a gallon and a half worth of the liquid on top.  If anyone is trying to repeat this process, I'd say use 1 gallon of water.

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.