Timeline: ECY Bug County & House Culture

October 2015

In October of last year I brewed a simple golden base and poured that onto what remained in the carboy after I kegged my last batch of sour from my "house culture". This culture is mainly bugs from a bottle of Hill Farmstead Nordic Saison I picked up at the brewery while on vacation in Vermont last year. The beer was excellent so I built the dregs up from that bottle and have made three sours with it since.

I also brewed a Saison this month and inoculated it with a liter of  beer from this culture.

November 2015

I wrote a script that alerts me whenever love2brew has ECY Bug County or Bug Farm back in stock so I was lucky enough to get a bottle last year. I brewed the same golden base for  this beer as the previous one and pitch the Bug County.

December 2015 - February 2016

I brewed a lot of beers during this time frame and completely forgot about the two sours above. Luckily both airlocks still had vodka in them so other than a little oxygen seepage we should be good to go.

February 2016

I finally got around to transferring both golden sours to secondaries. I took gravity readings and added a medium toast oak spiral to each batch.

Bug County Pellicle

House Culture Pellicle

Left: House Culture (stirred the yeast on accident) Right: ECY Bug County

Not the best picture but both beers had reached terminal gravity by month 4, crazy.

Bug County

House Culture

April-May 2016

Our homebrew club participated in the AHA big brew day and we all brought a keg of beer to serve. I decided to taste the Saison I brewed and inoculated back in October 2015 and found it to be not very Saison like at all. It was a pretty typical sour before Brett took over in the bottle. I was disappointed it hadn't turned out the way I expected (slightly tart with all the Saison qualities) so I kegged it and served it as a sour during big brew day. It was a big hit and I went home with only about a gallon left in the corny keg.

Sour Storage :)

July 2016

I had been tasting the golden sours right along and realized they weren't changing at this point. They've been at 1.000 SG for 5 months so I decided it was time to bottle both beers in hopes that a couple months in the bottle will bring out some brett character because right now all I'm getting is lactic sourness. They are tart beers just like the Saison was but pretty one dimensional. I've heard lots of anecdotal evidence about bottling bringing out the Brett character so that's where my hopes are riding. 

Racking to bottling bucket

Mmmm beer

Bottling wand attached and ready for service

We're on our way

1 batch down, 1 to go

Both batches were shy of 5 gallons. The ECY was 4 gallons and the house culture was just under 4 gallons. Being the dumb ass that I am I still carbonated with 5oz of dextrose so I guess I'm just crossing my fingers and hoping to avoid bottle bombs and gushers but I think I'll have some problems with both.

I combined the the leftover yeast and beer from both batches for my new "house culture". I also have a packet of Bootleg Biology's Baltifunk from this year's HomebrewCon Milk the Funk bottle share.  I'll be brewing those beers very shortly. I've very sorry I missed the bottle share but I didn't have anything ready other than a Berliner so I skipped it, maybe this culture will have what I'm looking for in my sours.

I'll have one of these beers in a month and see how they're progressing and post the tasting notes. If you have any tips for me please leave them in the comments.

Reusing Bottles (Removing Bottle Labels)

I've been kegging now for about a year and since I'm lazy I find it to be a far preferable choice to bottling my home brew. There are reasons to bottle however such as competition entries and sharing your brew somewhere besides where your keg-o-rator is located. Since I started out by bottling I have a bunch laying around but they're all 22 oz bomber bottles. These are too big to send in for competitions and when you give them out to friends you don't always get them back. Since I am lazy I prefer to bottle as much of my beer as I can in the bombers because it takes less time but I do bottle a portion into standard 12 oz long necks for sharing.

Rather than hitting the local home brew shop for new bottles I, and I'm sure many others, like to buy beer and as a side effect get the bottles for a nickel each. Just make sure your not buying twist off top bottles and you can pretty much use any brand. When you do this make sure to rinse the bottles well after finishing them off so they can be easily reused. 

In order to reuse a bottle you need to clean, sanitize and probably remove labels from the bottles. This task varies in difficulty depending on the brand of beer you bought. The easiest way to clean and remove labels is to use an oxygen based cleanser such as Five Star Chemicals PBW or even Oxyclean. Just fill up a large container with water and cleaner and let the bottles soak for an hour and if you bought the right brand of beer the labels will "sluff" right off. If you didn't buy the right brand be prepared to first scrape the label then scrub the glue off, it sucks so you may just want to consider buying a different brand of beer for bottle reuse.

Sanitizing is simple as well. Fill another container with a mixture of water and a no-rinse sanitizer like Five Star Chemicals Star San. If you're using Star San just let the bottles soak for at least a minute then place them upside down on a bottling tree or Fast-Rack stack-able bottling rack.

This is a pretty simple process that probably didn't warrant it's own blog post but the tip of soaking in an oxygen based cleaner alone may be useful to someone, somewhere at some point in time. I'm going to leave a tiny list of easy to remove and difficult to remove bottle labels. If you know of anymore, through your own experience, for either category, please leave it in the comments. Thanks for reading!

Easy Label Removal Brands

Magic Hat

Left Hand

Difficult Label Removal Brands

Southern Tier