|BACKGROUND|

On a sardonic note, seasonal beers are generally shit.

In this day and age, ain’t nobody got time for pumpkin beers, especially with seasonal creep pushing them onto shelves and preorders as early as June and July.

Beyond that, no, I don’t give a shit about your apricot wheat ale or your orange creamsicle hefeweizen. I’ll fuck with Oktoboberfest/Märzen lagers, though. There just approaches a point where you need to put a line in the sand with some shit, though.

Being honest – strawberry rhubarb isn’t an entirely unique concept as far as flavoring a beer. There’s a good number that come up if you google it. However, I can only coiciously think of two sours that even have rhubarb in them, outside of homebrew level stuff, those being LoverBeer’s Marche Le Ray (a sour brown with coffee and rhubarb) and Une Annee’s Le Seul XX, which is just Strawberry Rhubarb golden sour.

But maybe, just maybe, you grew up in the Southern US or had some family with some heritage from there. If so, then you may be familiar with the staple flavor of the summer. No I’m not talking about mint juleps, I’m talking about Strawberry-Rhubarb pie. It may not be as quintessentially ‘Murican as apple, but (arguably) better. Sweet, tangy, fruity, and robust, SBRP (henceforth) is my jam.

My mom used to make them when I was younger, using fresh rhubarb from the garden, occasionally with homegrown strawberries. It was “bae” before “bae” even existed as a term and pizza somehow took that title from the hipsters.

So, I sought out a way to put that shit in a bottle. Easier said than done.

Them Digits

Batch Size: 5 gallons

Mash Temp: 152F for 60 min.

Boil Time: 45 min.

Batch Efficiency: 65%

Original Gravity: 1.064 // 8.5 P (1.068 with lactose)

Final Gravity: 1.010 // 2.6 P

Estimated ABV: 7.1%

IBUs: 6

SRM: 26.9 EBC // 13.7 SRM

Recipe

Malts

8# Floor-Malted Pilsner| 55%

2# Carabrown | 14%

1# Red Wheat | 7%

1# Golden Naked Oats | 7%

1# Biscuit | 7%

1# Honey | 7%

.5# Lactose (added post “primary” fermentation) | 3%

Hops

1 oz. Belma @ 5 min.

Yeast

Bootleg Biology Sour Weapon P – Fermented at 90F for 3 days

Wyeast 1317 (London III) – Fermented at 74/75F

Spices and Stuff

2 mL Lactic acid (88%) added in mash water

1 tab of WhirlFloc @ 5 min

.5# Graham Crackers (added during boil, @ 30 min)

3# Strawberries

2.5# Rhubarb

Pinch of cinnamon

|BREW LOG|

The day actually started with a slightly more frantic moment of looking for strawberries. Ideally, I had hoped to use some local strawberries as well as homegrown rhubarb, but I guess I missed the season by a couple weeks. No help to the old lady who I asked at the local orchard. She pretty much laughed in my face when I asked about strawberries. Fuck you, I’m not some Amish/Mennonite person who works on a farm, I have better shit to remember than exactly what week you consider strawberry season to be over. Absolutely no help at all. So, since I am apparently a heathen “English” who should know better, I missed the boat on getting local, fresh berries and had to make due with going to the grocery store and buying shit from California.

After milling the grains, the mash was the next step. Since I had some darker malts, I assumed that I would need perhaps a little push to drive down the pH of the mash, so I used my metered syringe (minus the needle part) to pull 2 mL of lactic acid and dropped that into the mash water and brought it up to strike temp. Was quite happy when I took a temp reading and it showed right on target at 152F like I had wanted.

After 15 minutes of prepping to deal with the flavor bombs, I took a pH reading, which was sadly not as low as I would have hoped. This is more reinforcement to me that I need to get a water profile analysis done. I have no excuse for dragging my feet on this.

With a 60 minute mash, there is always downtime. As such, the work on the, arguably, most important part of the beer began – getting that delicious pie filling reading. As the “crust” was slowly going through its enzymatic conversions, three pounds of fresh strawberries met their fate at the hands of paring knives. Drawn and quartered (well, quarted, but not drawn), and thrown into a medium-sized pot with two and a half pounds of chopped (and previously frozen) rhubarb from my dad’s garden, I brought the fruit up to almost a boil and held it there for some time. Essentially, this process turn the fruit into a puree, even beyond just the ol’ chop, sugar, ‘n cornstarch of making a regular pie. Throw in a pinch of cinnamon for good measure (any mom’s secret ingredient) and I ended up with super tart pie filling (as I added no additional sugar to it). Goddamn, though, that house smelled amazing for hours afterward.

It’s easy as 1… 2… 3.

Admittedly, the finished product looks like the pink goo “beef” scare from a few years ago, but it was tasty. I set this off to the side to cool and went back to the other matter at hand – procuring the wort.

Post mash, I collected about 2.5 gallons of first runnings and sparged with about 3.5 gallons of water to collect 6 gallons in the kettle. Does that sound low? Yeah, well, it was supposed to be, but I took a pre-boil gravity check on my refractometer and it was surprisingly low, so I opted to tack on a few extra minutes to help pump up those goddamn rookie numbers (I’m slowly coming to the conclusion I may be sparging too fast and this might be killing my efficiency).Whatever the points, the beer looked stellar and it tasted good. The CaraBrown added great color, the Biscuit added… well, a biscuit-y flavor, and the red wheat and oats added some nice body. However, as far as flavor, it wasn’t very “pie crust-y” like I wanted. Hold onto your bippies, though, because shit is about to get real.

Cue the boil. I added the honey early on, around 40 minutes, because I’m a big fan of pushing for caramelization and Maillard’s Reactions and shit. I like that. The kicker is that this is also when I added in the secret ingredient: straight up graham crackers.

Now, I’ve done this in a beer once before, back when I was still wet behind the ears. It was the fall of 2012, and as every homebrewer does, I wanted to brew a pumpkin beer. In the end, it was okay. I learned my lesson about trying new shit (fermented with the PNW Yeast strain, I think it’s Rogue) as the beer turned out… okay. Really learned I just didn’t like that yeast strain, but I had also used graham crackers in the boil on that one, in some attempt to mimic the flavors of Southern Tier’s Pumking, but not have as much of a beetus-inducing sweetness.

Carefully measured Enjoying a soak in the kettle AND I THREW IT ON THE GROUND

While logic dictates that putting it into the mash is good, and that’s certainly a solid option, don’t let me shit on your dreams here, I fucks with putting them into the boil. I think that it adds a little more flavor and it makes for less sticky of a mash and way more fun as a story. Also, it totally ends up like a diaper of baby poop if you put it in a painter’s bag.

Unlike the last straight up sour ale I did (Sour As A Weapon), I opted to shoot for a little hop character in this beer, namely in the form of using Belma hops. At the time of writing this, I’m a little apprehensive. I had initially done some cursory research on the hop and my pants got a little tighter when I saw that it had “strawberry and melon aroma”, which fit perfectly with the beer. A good handful of people have used it in SMaSH beers to much chagrin of being stupidly strawberry forward. Subsequent research has also shown it to be “spicier Galaxy”, which is good too, but I also saw some people calling it “mild Citra” which makes me slightly nervous, as I don’t particularly want any grapefruit bullshit going on here. I suppose time will tell.

Knowing that I wanted aroma, and keeping in mind that Pedio has a higher IBU tolerance than Lacto but still dislikes high IBU beers, the ounce went in at 5 minutes, leaving it as an aroma addition with minimal impact on bitterness.

At this point, tasting the wort ended up with much more of a pleasant, round pie crust flavor than the initial taste had imparted. I considered this quite the triumph.

After the timer went off for the boil, I began the pump for the wort chiller and started to drop the temperature down. Even though I knew that I was going to initially ferment the Pedio at 90F for 2-3 days, I still wanted to get it down to 70F for a good cold break. In about 20 minutes, I had succeeded in my goal and was ready to move into racking into the fermenter. I quickly stole a bit with a sanitized dropper and put it on the handy dandy new refractometer (courtesy of treating myself on Prime Day) to see that I had come in a few degrees shy of my initial estimate from recipe building – an OG of 1.064 (compared to the 1.068 I was shooting for). Close enough.

Then it was simply a matter of pouring the “puree” into the carboy, pitching the critters, and racking in the wort. Not the most complicated of tasks and it went off without a hitch. Racking onto the fruit kicked up all sorts of scents though, reaffirming the thought “fuck yeah, this beer’s gonna be tits”. Afterwards, it was hooked up to the heating wrap and InkBird thermal control, set at 90F, where it would ferment for 3 days.

The trick here, though, was to shorten the time spent fermenting. Previously with souring, I was using a saison yeast strain, which enters the realm of “fuck it, you like 85F temps, you go to town” and just turning off the heat, rather than having any attempt at cooling. However, with the London III, I wanted to at least be under 75F for “secondary” fermenting. This provides a challenge, as I don’t have any way to properly cool (aside from swamping, so… no cooling). I figured that a fun trick would be to use a lactose syrup to do so.

Now, a part of this was dual functioning. A large portion of my decision to do a cold charge was that I wasn’t sure if Pedio (rather, this strain, P. pentosaceus) could ferment lactose (which it seemingly can). I wanted that to stay in the beer, not get eaten away (note: According to Milk The Funk, most strains can’t). I also got a second idea out of this, though – make a sterile lactose syrup and use it to essentially crash the beer down. Easy enough. One cup of water, boiled, half a pound of lactose, and then covered with a lid and placed in the fridge until it was cold as fuck. This was then dumped into the fermenter, which had a nice effect of lowering the beer down to 87.8F – A nice 1.6 degree drop. Honestly, in retrospect, thinking that dumping a cup of cold liquid in 5 gallons and cooling it anything more than that was woefully optimistic. Thus, to pitch the yeast at an acceptable temperature, the carboy got swamped.

Putting the carboy in a tub and water bath with a little ice did the trick. Overnight, the temperature dropped down to 74F, which was low enough to where I was comfortable pitching the London III in. From there, the beer was continued to be cooled down to ~70F and held there for 3 days. Finally, I figured that was enough time and that if the temp was gonna rise, let it.

Cue bottling day. Having given the beer a week to ferment out at ~72F and seeing no blow-off activity, I decided the beer was ready enough to bottle.

Sadly, I fell up the stairs getting the carboy out of the basement. Good news is that I didn’t drop it and lose all 5 gallons, nor was it a glass carboy, so it didn’t shrapnel into a million shards of razors and fuck my shit up. Bad news was that this means the entire yeast bed got stirred up and I lost the ability to rack about half a gallon’s worth of beer and it also kicked up a shit ton of rhubarb into the nice clean part I was going to try and rack. I suppose life is all about the small victories.

However, this did provide another caveat that I was displeased with. I had made a simple syrup with 3/4 cup (~5.3 oz.) of table sugar to prime up to 2.8 volumes of CO2, using the 5 gallons as my measurement for the volume of the batch. Luckily, this derivation landed me in safe territory, as with the 4.25 gallons I actually got of viable liquid would be carbonated up to 3.1 vol. of CO2, which is saison/biere de gard territory – still not making sweet bottlerockets out of my liquid labor of love.

Tasting it at bottling, however, also yielded some interesting twists. First, I know that I kicked up a whole bunch of shit into solution with my little tumble, but the beer was a lot lighter than I had thought it was going to be. I was actually hoping for a little darker color, closer to a brown than an amber. I guess that looking back, it’s about 14-15 SRM, which it was supposed to be, but I guess the color indicator on my brewing calculator showed it slightly darker than what I can see visually. Hopefully it’ll get more of that ruddy hue when all the smeg settles out of the beer.

I was also a little disappointed in the level of tartness in the beer. I have a sneaky feeling that the strawberry-rhubarb pie filling jolted the pH of the beer down pretty far. Since I followed the same process as brewing Sour As A Weapon, same style of pitching, same bacteria, same temp hold and time, I was assuming I’d get the same level of lactic tartness. Spoiler alert: I didn’t, for some reason. The beer was tart, sure, but much more of a mild tartness than the kick-your-tits-off level of tartness that I got last time. Since the Pedio has a self-terminating quality at 3.3 pH, I’m guessing it just hit that faster than last time with all the oxalic acid from the rhubarb. Sucks to suck.

Outside of that, the flavors were solid. I got a lot of the nice golden cracker and graham flavor, the rhubarb added a middle tone that rides along, and the mild tartness and sweetness actually work well. Despite there not being an overwhelmingly strawberry flavor (something I had expected, knowing how the fruit works in beer), it does taste remarkably similar to the pie itself. In fact, despite using 1317 and fermenting at a moderate temperature, the brew had the smell and taste of a slightly Belgian quality – light hints of banana and clove. Not sure where that came from at all, but it works. At least in that current juncture of time, the beer wasn’t a complete failure in every regard.

My only other gripe for the day would be that I didn’t get the wax for the bottle quite as bright pink as I wanted. Since the age of coffee coming in nice #10 cans seems to have passed us by, I reused a can with some residual red wax in it from a past bottling. More glue sticks, more paraffin, and it was definitely light, but still red. Sadly, my stock of Crayola was running a bit low, so with only 3 pink jawns and 1 white, the best I was able to get up to was a salmon pink, not the fluorescent Barbie color I had really wanted. At the end of the day, good enough. I managed to nail the consistency on the wax, though – I got nice, flexible drips and no cracking around the caps, which is something I had noticed in previous batches. I’m fairly sure that it’s a combination of getting a balance between the glue sticks, the wax, and the crayons, but also a bit of not dipping the bottles with the wax being too warm, that the cracking was related partly to the shrinking during the cooling process.

So, time will tell on this. I think in a “worst case scenario, I can plop the case of these fucker in my car for a day while I’m at work and that might jolt the Pedio back into action and get a little more tartness out. I feel like that’s also a little risky for carbonation levels as well.

Tasting Notes

I think the most important thing to note is that I at least nailed the crust aspect of this one. I get a nice, mellow honey and graham flavor. Is the color as dark as I wanted? No, but that’s okay. It ends up being a nice, ruddy brown color with just a twinge of rusty auburn to it. Ideally, I wanted more of that sweet, sweet, bourbon color I got from the first running, but this is nice too. At least I don’t have to explain it as “No it’s a sour brown ale, not an oud bruin.”

The rhubarb and strawberry flavors blossom while the beer breathes and warms up, like the ugly duckling in middle school getting boobs and turning into the hot nerdy girl in every single high school Rom-Com. It’s worth noting that the strawberry tickles that weird “beer strawberry” flavor like a Hanssen’s Oude Beitje, not that bullshit “pink” flavor like a Laffy Taffy. I, for one, dig that. However, the balance with the sweetness from the lactose and the fruit stops shy of approaching that sweet tart bullshit that I hate. It’s just shy of that, but enough that I’m not going to be slamming these like it’s going out of style. I do think that the small addition of Belma definitely helped hold the flavor. Perhaps I should have used a little more to really drive in that fruity flavor.

Despite using London III to finish him, it does pick up an oddly Belgian tone. I get that little stone fruit-y twinge that you’re supposed to from the yeast, but there’s this weird little ester that taunts me. I had to call my dad and actually double check that we had pitched the right yeast and not some old ass pack of trappist shit that was hiding in the wings. We did, so… for fermenting in the range that it likes, definitely got some interesting tones out of it. I feel like I remember talking with someone and them saying that rhubarb can interact with Pedio and make some strange compounds, but that also could be a totally fabricated memory I made up in some sort of fever dream-like state. It has been known to happen.

The beer was definitely a higher carbonation than I wanted, though. This was to be expected, after my small kerfuffle with the steps disparaging my yield and my lack of compensation with priming syrup. I was actually scared shitless after I opened a bottle warm and it gushed harder than a cam girl in a gold show, but an overnight stay in the fridge actually put the CO2 into solution and it is just that saison/biere de garde level of high carb. I think the beer would benefit from less, but that’s not exactly an option, now is it.

The tartness is still going to be a sticking point for me. It is a little more tart than I expected than it was at bottling, with the carbonation contributing a little more bite to it, but it’s still more on the mild end than I had initially hoped for. Oddly enough, I think it actually works. If I had gotten that tartness ratcheted up to 11, I don’t think the more subtle flavors would actually have been as apparent. I definitely should have used some more strawberries, though. Going in, I knew I’d get that mild flavor, but it needs a hint more. It falls just short of that pie filling I actually wanted.

I guess I would call this a mild success? I’m not quite the tart, sweet, and juicy pie-in-a-glass sour I had hoped for, but I’d be terribly remiss to call it a failure, by any stretch of the imagination. I’ll chalk it up to being a fun experiment, but not something that I’m going to be super proud of. This is one drawing that I can’t be mad at mom for not putting on the fridge.