I t’s said that the two best days of a boat owners life is the day they buy their boat and the day they sell it. I’m a little ashamed to admit that’s how I feel about my 15-gallon Dad’s Hat Rye Whiskey (now sour) barrel at home. I got it as a gift five years ago and was pumped, I brewed three straight days to fill it. That initial thrill slowly faded each year I had to empty it knowing I would have to rebrew 15-gallons of beer, bottle, keg, fruit, or whatever I’m planned on doing to package the beer. But, despite the work and patience, cracking a bottle that’s a few years old is always worth the effort!

At Sapwood Cellars, I’ve become known as just the hop guy. Customers will come in and ask me if I’m the hop guy or the sour guy. The thing is, I’m much more than just the hop guy; I have feelings, ambitions, and even some sour beer getting funky at home! Thankfully, I made strides towards becoming more than just a haze maker with the 2017 brew (2018 barrel drop) mixed fermented sours, particularly with the cherry and raspberry portion! A great combination of science, pro dregs from a trip to Belgium, luck, and lots of fruit produced one of my favorite batches to date.

A little background on my barrel, I’ve had five beers go through it and it’s slowly losing some of the strong oak and whiskey character with each consecutive batch. Because I was told not to put a pale(ish) beer through the barrel first, I decided to put a pale(ish) beer through the barrel first. People drink straight whiskey, right?

After the Old Ale-like beer, I started brewing a dark saison each year, which was really just a saison with a little bit of midnight wheat for coloring and flaked quinoa and flaked rye. I added only a few bottle dregs from my favorite bottles over those years and I was always happy with the results, but most of the bottles I open today have very subtle funk and medium to low acidity (these batches often taste like a tart purple popsicle to me).

Once you introduce bacteria to a barrel, it’s sticking around making a permanent home for itself. Because of this, I wanted my barrel to have meaningful and tasty bugs. So, when traveling around Lambic Land two years ago with my good friend Sean Gugger, I took sanitized vials with me everywhere I went during the trip. Any of the bottles that I really enjoyed, I’d swirl up the dregs in the bottle and dump them into my vial to fly back home to build up with starter wort. I typically went for younger lambic beers without fruit, thinking I was getting a fresher batch of yeast/bacteria and tasting a beer without the fruit gives you a better idea of what the bugs are actually doing to the beer. By the way, I’m super pumped for Sean and all craft beer fans living in and around Brooklyn, NY because he’ll be opening Shadow Brewing there soon!

For the beer in this post, I brewed a pale base and fermented it with Omega HotHead Ale yeast. I like the fact that the HotHead strain doesn’t require any fermentation temperature control, which is great when you have three different carboys fermenting to fill the barrel (and likely not that much space in a home fermentation chamber). I also like the fruitier character the strain can provide. Although the primary yeast characteristics will mostly disappear with a year aging in a barrel with bacteria, I don’t mind the potential of a fruit-like funk as a result! After a year aging in the barrel, I racked four gallons onto raspberries/cherries, five gallons spent time with pinot noir concentrate, and the remaining five gallons was dry hopped with Hallertau Blanc (only during the time it took to bottle it).