|BACKGROUND|

This particular brew ended up being one of those “whole family” kinda projects.

In recent years, the trend of how beer is approached as a drinker has shifted heavily from a brand loyalty approach (“I’m a Miller/Coors/Bud/Yeungling/etc. guy”) to that of how wine is approached (“I like cabernets”), meaning that instead of sticking to one brand and drinking through their portfolio, drinkers typically find a style they like and latch onto it, opting to try everyone’s take on said style

However, another aspect of the wine realm has absolutely made its way into beer culture – the grapes themselves.

Granted, wine barrel aging caught on slowly after the bourbon barrel hype train left the station in the mid to late 00’s, but there’s been a slow burn of using wine grapes as a crucial ingredient in beer for close to two decades. If we’re going to start doling out credit for the clever American breweries pushing the trend (not to squelch those innovative Belgians), Dogfish Head’s Midas Touch may be able to steal the first credit for beer wine hybrids. Even beyond their first Ancient Ale, they continued the trend though with Red & White, Noble Rot, Chateu Jiahu, 61 Minute, and an assortment of other “off-center” ales over the past 17 years. Others that could get an OG nod would include Steve Pauwels at Boulevard using Muscat grape must for priming their bottle conditioned Harvest Dance Wheat Wine as far back as ’09. Hell, Vinnie Cilurzo is born in bred of vintner stock, and despite that Russian River makes few sours using grapes, he’s been ripping the enamel off your canines with the -ation series since 2005 and pimping the Sonoma Valley wine barrel scene hard ever since. Even more impressive, in the first year that Captain Lawrence was open (2006), Scott Vaccarro snagged the GABF gold for Cuvee de Castleton.

However, in the recent years, another trend has been surging through the brewing community: using grapes in sours. Fans of the style are generally familiar with the fanfare of familiar crowd pleasers like Cantillon, Jester King, Hill Farmstead, but even then, the production of wine-beer hybrids has only been a boon in bringing wine drinkers into the fold of craft beer and vice versa, bridging two worlds like some fucked up Marvel plotline.

I’d say this has been a beer that’s been on the back burner for about a year or two. Once the boys in the US figured out that kettle souring was an easy way to crank the tartness on a beer to 11, it’s been on my list of shit to do. At first, I had wanted to do a sour using grapes, but then I hadn’t figured out a system to actually achieve my souring process. Then, last year, once I finally got my shit together, I had already missed grape season (plus, buying straight must online is expensive).

This year, I luckily stumbled upon the fact that a local produce distributor in my area holds yearly sales for fresh wine grapes, by the box or in gallons of must. Needless to say, I jumped at the chance. (Note: I only included a link in case some lokes want to investigate further for next year)

Them Digits

Batch Size: 5.5 gallons

Mash Temp: 149F for 60 min.

Boil Time: 30 min.

Batch Efficiency: 70%

Original Gravity: 1.060 // 14.7 P

Final Gravity: 1.010 // 2.6 P

Estimated ABV: 6.9% (with fruit)

IBUs: 0

Color: 4.1 EBC // 8.1 SRM (without fruit+)

Recipe

Malts

6# Belgian Pilsner | 60%

2# Red/White Wheat | 20%

1# Spelt |10%

1# Rye| 10%

Hops

1 oz. Nelson Sauvin @ Dryhop (3 days)

Yeast

Bootleg Biology Sour Weapon – Fermented at 85F for 3-4 days, then lowered to 76F

Bootleg Biology Chardonnay – Fermented at 68F

Spices and Stuff

1 tablet Whirlfloc @ 15 min

1 tsp Pectic Enzyme (Pectinase)

6# Valdapena Grapes (as must, roughly 6.5 cups of liquid)

3.5# Blueberries

~ 8 grams of Butterfly Pea Blossoms

|BREW LOG|

The actual beginning of the story starts back in the end of September/start of October. I had been champing at the bit, anxious to get my hand on the box of wine grapes I had ordered. Luckily, I had found someone to split the box with, as I really only wanted about 6 pounds out of the 36 pound box I had to order to get my sweet ass fresh gurps. Once everything was resolved, I had to process the goods, since I actually wasn’t 100% sure when I was going to be able to brew – I had not brewed anything at all the whole month of September (which is why I had a month on involuntary absence posting).

To this end is where my first parent got involved: my mom.

Throught the course of my life, my mother has always been super hands on. From gardening to canning and a myriad of other projects in between, she’s been a huge influence on me (and it probably a reason why I have such a DIY attitude). As noted, she’s been canning for as long as I can remember. Every year, she’d jar up peaches, pickles, and jellies for just in house use and submitting to our local fair competitions. If anyone was going to be able to help me out on this quest, she was going to be the best to ask.

Initially, I was actually hanging out with my mom under the guise of wanting to spend time together, but I had a more subversive goal: I wanted to use that sweet, sweet Victorio juicer to get my juice outta these ‘member berry wannabes. After discussion exactly what I wanted to do with the grapes, we decided it would just be smarter to do the old school jelly-making style of graping on the stove. We picked the grapes off the stems, popped them in a large pot with a little bit of water, and slowly brought them up to a simmer and mashing them with a… masher. Immediately, the kitchen filled with the sweet aroma of grape juice and the purple leeched slowly out of the skins until it was a vibrant magenta.

Since we weren’t using a fancy machine to separate the juice from the seeds and skins now, we had to rely on the time-tested method using canning bags and cheesecloth to strain the solids out, since I still wanted to use them in the beer (hopefully to extract some more color, as well as some more tannic flavors). This led me to end up with about 6.5 cups of liquid and a gallon ziplock bag with probably 3 cups of detritus.

The fun came from tasting the actual juice after the whole ordeal was done. I ended up with a royal purple/magenta grape juice that absolutely shit all over Welch’s (which is borderline blasphemy to me). I’m not typically a believer in hype, let alone pretentious sommelier tasting notes of “leather, tobacco, vanilla, and earthy”, but goddamn if those really weren’t the flavors that I picked up tasting it. Maybe it was psychosomatic but… it was really good, really expensive grape juice.

Afterwards, it go put in to sanitized mason jars, while warm, and then allowed to form a nice vacuum seal to ensure that it would be ready until brewday. The jars stayed in the fridge and the skins stayed in the freezer.

Two weeks or so later, it was time.

On the tail end of a double, the rest followed the traditional brewing schedule. First up was measuring out and milling the grains. Relatively a barebones recipe, it’s just my standard saison base. I heated up the water to temp for mashing at 148F, and continued on to the usual infusion mash. Pretty sure I had fallen into the same issue I had earlier during the day where I stopped paying attention or was doing too many things at once and the mash water got a little hot and I had to coax it back down with some gentle stirring. In the end, I ended up mashing at 149F, which is just fine, and gave it a 60 minute rest. After about 15 minutes, I took a small sample and did a pH reading, which came out about 5.6 pH, which is slightly high, but I also used no dark grains and didn’t do any water treatment. Meh. Just another reinforcement that I need to get a water reading done so that I can accurately start adjusting water levels.

In the mean time, I turned my attention to the 3.5# of blueberries I was going to use to help drive the purple even harder in the paint. Following a similar method as I had done to the grapes, I put the blueberries in a pot with ~ 1/2 cup of water and just started to mash away. In form, the blueberries went from blue and green to a deep bruise colored purple, just like the iconic pie filling. I dumped the puree (?) into a giantic tupperware container to be kept in the fridge until a later date. I wasn’t going to rack directly on top of this like I have in previous brews.

After the mash was finished, I collected roughly 3 gallons of wort in the kettle and proceeded to sparge like normal. However, due to the fact that I was going to be adding 6 additional cups of liquid to the mash, I held back a gallon of sparge water to compensate.

With the sun already setting and the rain having mostly cleared up, boil started with 7 gallons of wort in the kettle. Since I only wanted to make sure there weren’t any other fun critters living in the brew, I gave it a 30 minute, no hop boil, just to make sure. At about 10 minutes, I added in the extra grape skins, tied neatly in a painter’s bag. Admittedly, I was a little disappointed. I was hoping to really get a nice, purple color out of the skins, especially since I was making all sorts of references to the infamous Micky D’s character, as well as loosely referencing Danny Brown lyrics and lean.

Once I reached time, I poured in the two jars of must, doing double duty as adding the beer post boil to not create an incredible amount of pectin haze and to also help cool the beer quickly, as the juice was cold. Logically, it shouldn’t have been this crazy change of color, as adding 3/4 a gallon of liquid to like 5.5 gallons of another shouldn’t really have that much of an effect on the color. Still, I had been uncharacteristically hopeful that it would. What I did end up with was a lavender/lilac shade of purple (or dare I say, light urple?). The juice addition also managed to drop my temp form boil to almost 190F, which was an excellent jump before I even turned on the pump for the wort chiller. Despite the fact that I was going to ferment it at 90F for a few days, I cooled it down to 70F because I’d rather have a clean cold break than piddle around with a beer that’s got a hefty amount of chill haze.

I took a gravity reading and it clocked in at 1.060/14.7 P, which seemed a little low for what I had planned, until I realized that I had actually calculated my water for a 60 minute boil, and not 30. I did a good job on checking that one. Alternatively, I also had checked the must itself to see what its inherent gravity was before blending and it read a solid 1.083/20 P, which is kinda like “duh, it was for wine”. And pretty much just concentrated grape juice. Either way, it was definitely nice to see just how light purple the beer was in the carboy, thinking that the blueberries would absolutely get me to that shade of purple that I was dreaming of.

I applied the heat wrap, set the temp control, and threw in the Pedio to let the bugs chew away at the beer for a few days.

Upon checking in 3 days later to see where we were tartness-wise, I received a fun surprise that the sediment in solution had settled out and the beer was not in fact purple, but a deep, blood red. Well, shit. I mean, I had added red grape juice to the beer, not blue or purple. I was just shocked at how red it had turned as compared to the pale purple I had seen on brewday. Since the beer had reached a desired tartness, it was time to proceed to phase two of the plan.

Having learned from my rookie mistake in thinking that a cup of chilled liquid would do any sort of job dropping the temperature of the beer in moving to secondary fermentation, I had assumed that the massive volume of blueberry compote that I had made would more effectively accomplish my goal, which it actually did. The temp dropped from 90F to about 76F, which was still slightly higher than what I was shooting for temperature wise for the second yeast strain. Easily enough, the problem was resolved with dropping the heat and allowing the carboy to bask in the brisk Pennsylvania-in-the-fall basement overnight. It’s also worth noting this here is where the pectic enzyme also got added in simultaneously with the berries, as well as some oak staves that I had been soaking in red wine since brew day.

I’ve also never used the Chardonnay yeast strain from Bootleg before. Despite being sourced from a vineyard in California, the yeast itself was claimed to be more of an ale yeast than a wine yeast, coming from, well, the skin of chardonnay grapes. Seeing as how it was recommended for use in tropical NEIPAs, I figured it was maybe somewhere between a saison yeast and an English ale yeast. Either one would be a welcome addition to the current state of affairs, but I was hoping that it was more akin to a saison – I wanted that bone dry, Hawbecker-style crane kick to the nips of enamel peeling sour with little to no sweetness.

After there were no active signs of fermentation, we took a gravity reading: 1.010. Slightly higher than I had expected, but maybe it was just stalling a little on the tail end of the fermentation. I wasn’t exactly in a rush with the beer, but at the same time, Halloween was sneaking up and I was hoping the beer I had brewed in tandem with it was going to be ready by then and I’d rather just bottle them both in one fell swoop.

After another 5 days, to be sure, another gravity reading showed it at 1.010 still. Welp, fuck. I guess that’s all that we’re going to get out of it. Looking back at their website, BB lists the yeast as actually getting about 70-80% attenuation, where I had gotten about an 83% apparent attenuation. On the other hand, I hadn’t given them a super long contact time, but the blueberries weren’t getting the beer quite as purple as I had hoped and were floating quite nicely atop the beer as well, a precursor that I’d have to deal with that at bottling.

After scheduling a bottling date, I told my dad to drop in the ounce of Nelson Sauvin hops that had been on reserve. I should have also told him to punch down the berries first, but it seems that a majority of the pellets made their way into the liquid beneath the fruitage. From there, it was a 3 day waiting game before I could tear myself away from work long enough to bottle. Checking the gravity one final time while racking over into the bucket form the carboy, the ale was still solidly at 1.010. I admitted my defeat. Also, I was disappointed with how light in color the same looked in the graduated cylinder while measuring. It was almost pink.

Perhaps a few days before that, though, one of my friends from homebrew club had stopped by the bottleshop and I had mentioned that I was slightly disappointed in the fact that I beer was not as aubergine as I had wanted. He offered up another solution for me – butterfly pea blossoms. Not something I was familiar with, he continued to tell me how they worked and that he had a mead aging on some and that it was, in fact, blue as fuck.

Some quick research demonstrated that he was, in fact, not full of shit. Butterfly pea blossoms are a great natural food coloring. Even then, they had an added cool factor of being pH reactive, similar to red cabbage juice, but decidedly more palatable. I headed to the ever faithful internet and ordered a 50g pack.

Before After

Armed with my newly discovered secret weapon, I came to bottling day with, what I thought, was bringing a gun to a knife fight. I added the pea blossoms to my priming solution in anticipation that I would be getting the brew right where I wanted it. In fact, I may have been slightly heavy handed with how much I was using.

I also hadn’t corrected my priming sugar calculator form bottling the doppelbock beforehand, and I also had a higher volume of liquid, so I ended up having to whip up another batch of priming syrup, as well as dosing it heftily again with more pea blossoms. Using 3/4 cup (5.5 oz) of sugar (in total), I was shooting for ~ 3.0 vol of CO2 in solution.

For our bottling day, we had gotten off to a slightly late start, and as I still had work the next morning after an hour drive, I opted to not prolong our masochistic ritual of bottling, labeling, and waxing all 40+ bottle by hand that night. Labels were good enough to share with friends, and I also already had a purple waxed sour before, so if anything, I was going to be able to keep the beers apart (well, with the 1 or 2 surviving bottle of the older sour). And so we waited patiently until the day of reckoning.

Tasting Notes

The bottle opens with a satisfying hiss and, immediately, you can smell the beer. It smells like berries and grapes, hands down. Pouring it into the glass, there’s a lightly pink head, almost like wisps of the worse flavor of cotton candy (because everyone knows that blue is clearly superior). It fades slightly fast, but manages to hold onto the glace with a bit of lacing. But the nose! It’s juicy red fruits, port wine, and pie filling.

Does it look good? Yes. Dear god, this looks like a gnarly uber-kriek, only a step below the monster cabernet colored mutants like Mikkeller SpontanCherry Fredricksdal or Drie Fonteinen Intense Red. But it’s not purple. Lil Wayne does not want to pour a 4 in a 20 oz and call it 24. Ronald McDonald isn’t making it do the truffle shuffle. Harold is not fucking up his wallpaper and going on adventures with it. I failed on my goal of making a legitimately purple beer. At least, this time.

It’s safe to say that I achieved my goal from a flavor perspective readily. This bitch is wine on wine on wine on fruit. The oak slides in very lightly, but it’s like riding a rollercoaster of flavor. I’m going to say that the Nelson hits you first, slapping you with some gooseberry and white wine flavors, then the sweetness comes in with the grapes and the faint malt base, then the berries follow at the end with, maybe the yeast esters? This ends up almost being just a bunch of red gushers completely liquified. It’s juicy, then the tartness hits you, like some reverse sour patch kid commercial. It’s definitely tart, but not overly so. It’s a light jab to the back of the jaw, like you’re edging your salivary glands, but not puckeringly drying out your mouth.

A small part of my confusion in identifying everything and trying to put them in neat little boxes that the Chardonnay yeast is wild card status – I don’t know what it is or isn’t contributing to this smorgasbord of juice. It could have amplified a lot, it could have done jack. I just can’t tell, and with all the moving parts of this beer, I’m just going to have to accept it at face value for being tasty.

Despite being mashed so low and the AWA carb level, it’s actually got a solid mouthfeel. It’s not slick or heavy, but it’s definitely on the curvier side than the thinner side. It’s satisfying, like reminding you it there. It lingers, but not to the point of being unwelcome, and there’s no bitterness or off flavors that cling to the back of your tongue.

I think it’s slightly sweeter than I wanted, as it finished in the double digits still, but the higher carbonation, combined with everything else, helps pare that down a little, landing it comfortably into the “acceptable” level of sweet. I mean, so long as it isn’t Lindemann’s level of sweet (which would have required some backsweetening), I think we’re good.

The weird thing is that, when it’s colder, the flavors are all slightly off beat. You get the all, but they’re all playing at their own tempo and the don’t sync up, with some trying to vie for dominance over others. It’s not bad, it’s just… not quite. But as the beer warms up and breathes, the flavors all find the right tempo and start to mingle together harmoniously into a melodic performance of flavor.

Was it, overall, a win? Sure. But I’m still butthurt over the fact that it’s not fucking purple. Everything else is pretty awesome, though.

I did send a little care package, including a bottle of this, out to a well-known member of the homebrewing community for sampling and reviewing. I think it’ll be interesting to hear what his thoughts are on the matter in a few weeks. We’ll have to just wait and see.