Caitlin & Eddie's Baby Brew: Part 1

A couple buddies of mine have a baby on the way, so naturally we decided to predetermine this baby's affinity for craft beer by brewing some celebratory sours. The goal was to have something ready by the time the baby is born (June-ish) and something that would age very well in the bottle so they could open one every year on the baby's birthday. Seeing as it's already February, these two goals are impossible to meet with one beer, which is a great excuse to brew two beers! Given the celebratory nature of these beers, it seemed appropriate that we make a day out of it and have a couple friends over for a tasting while brewing.

The first brew is intended to be the beer that will bottle age well, and will spend roughly a year in primary with ECY 20 which contains many strains of Brett, as well as Sach, Pedio, and Lacto. I'm hoping the complex array of Brett strains will scavenge oxygen from these bottles for years to come. When we were planning these beers we tossed around the idea of using fruit, blueberries if the baby were a boy and raspberries if a girl. Turns out she's a girl, Annabelle, so raspberries might be added to one or both of these beers closer to bottling. Each bottle will also get a nice coat of pink or red wax.

My first inclination when planning a beer that would bottle age well was to crank up the ABV as high as I could reasonably make it. But after recently doing a little cellar clearing and opening some high ABV beers that were noticeably over the hill with a few years age I opted to keep the ABV below the tolerance threshold for all the bugs involved. After tasting a few 10 year old sours that are around 5-6% ABV I'm definitely convinced that keeping active cultures in the bottle slows the rate of oxidation and increases shelf life. I also included Dextrin Malt in addition to the high mash temp to give the Brett plenty of big meals to slowly chew on.

Big Fetus: Golden Sour
--------------------------
Batch Size: 5.5 gal
Expected OG: 1.058
Expected IBU: 12.1
Efficiency: 65%
Boil Time: 60 mins
Mash: 60 mins @ 160

Grain Bill
----------
9.0 lbs Pilsen - 62.07%
2.0 lbs Wheat Malt - 13.79%
2.0 lbs Pale Malt - 13.79%
1.0 lbs Quaker Old Fashioned Oats - 6.9%
0.5 lbs Carapils (Dextrin) - 3.45%

Hops
-------
1.0 oz Hallertauer Pellets - 4.6%AA @ 40 mins.

Extras
-------
0.5 tsp Yeast Nutrients - boiled and added in primary (+14 hours)

Yeast
-------
ECY 20 Bug County

Notes
-------
-Starter prepared morning of brew day 2/18 with 8 oz. canned 1.042 wort. Strong activity by pitching time. A small amount of starter wort was added back to the ECY 20 bottle to prop the remaining bugs up. This will be refrigerated in case I feel like plating it for isolation purposes or something.

-First boil on the blichmann burner - took forever to reach boiling due to both propane tanks being low. Ended up about a quarter gallon under volume with 5.25 gallons at 1.054, meaning I also need to adjust my efficiency down a little.

-Having a tasting during the brew day proved to be a slight distraction, nearing the end of the boil I hadn't sanitized the carboy or set up the plate chiller. The wort may have waited in the boil kettle an extra 10 minutes or so, probably slightly increasing IBUs. I also forgot to add whirlfloc and the yeast nutrients, so nutrients were boiled and added to primary the next morning, when signs of fermentation had already begun.

-Carboy kept in closet at ambient temp (60)

-By Sunday 2/23 (+5 days) Sacch had fermented out all it could and bubbling totally stopped. So begins the wait for pellicle formation.