I was able to get my hands on a pure Fantome Yeast Culture from a friend and I have been looking forward to using it as the Primary yeast strain on a blonde beer, which I finally got around to doing several months later.  I spent a long time stepping this Yeast up in a starter, using some of it for secondary on another beer, and the yeast seemed quite viable when I pitched it.  I took the grain bill from the “Wild Brews” book, which gives a recipe suggested to use when fermenting with 100% Brettanomyces yeast, and adjusted it slightly for what I had laying around Hop and Grain-wise.  I ended up with:

13# Maris Otter / 1# Acid Malt / 2# Wheat

1 oz Centennial at 90 mins / 1 oz Cascade at 10 mins

90 Minute Mash @ 148 degrees / 90 Minute Boil

Pitched 750ml of Brett slurry at 70 degrees

Very smooth brew day in all, came it at around 5.25 hours including a longer mash and boil than I usually do.  Vigorous fermentation with high Krausen at 24 hours, lots of gas being kicked out of this already.  Fermenting nicely in my kitchen next to my Mead that’s been going for about a month.

As usual I’ll try to post results as they come in.  I plan on primarying this for 2 weeks at room temp and then conditioning it a bit colder for 2 more weeks before bottling it with priming sugar and letting it age for a while.  I’m still trying to figure out what to brew next –  I’m thinking of working on my first Lager.

Beer on Mars. by mrb

Brewery Ommegang is many things — a beautiful brewhouse on a former hop farm, the westernmost outpost of the Duvel Moortgat empire, host of the anual Belgium Comes to Cooperstown festival, and one of the staunchest upholders of traditional Belgian brewing anywhere in the world.  Ommegang is also one of the most widely distributed American Craft Breweries — it’s everywhere.  They make some excellent beers and some others that are a bit tame for my tastes, but after my experience with Bier De Mars, I think I’m going to go back and give them all another fair shake — it’s been a while.

Bier De Mars is a beautifully dry, low ABV reddish beer in approximately the Biere de Garde style.  Biere de Garde is a style akin to Saison – not wholly well defined, but recognizable when you see one.  Bier De Mars has the additional flavor and aroma profile which is contributed by the use of Brettanomyces Yeast, which gives an excellent musky aroma and a slight tartness on the palate.  This beer pours with a big, crackling frothy white head that releases a great deal of Brett aromas and a nice hint of malt as well — there is a nice amount of body up front, but as any good Belgian beer does, it finishes very dry.  Quite a digestible, sessionable beer that controls the use of Brett in an excellent way.  A bottle conditioned, corked and caged bottle, I think this would be a good beer to try and age — the character could really develop over time.  This beer definitely gives any other “Infected Sessions” beers (logo by Maya coming soon) a run for their money, and knowing that at certain times of the year I can get a champagne bottle full of this stuff for under $20 (in some cases, much less) is just awesome. For a brewery on the scale of Ommegang to produce a beer like this is not only gutsy, it shows a hell of a lot of just plain skill.  Score another one for New York, and embrace the wild yeast — let this infect your next session, you won’t be sorry.

Right away red flags were raised when Ceeg ordered a Lagunitas “Censored,” and I ordered the Brett and I, and it took us a full minute of deep sniffing to make sure that I was actually drinking the Brett beer.  While the beer opened up a bit over time, I really did not get any of the satisfying funk I was looking for.  This was a nice, sessionable, pretty bitter beer that is typical of Smutty’s offerings, but no way was it funky or even Bretty for the most part.  There was a nice amount of balancing malt here and the body was perfect.  I could drink this beer all day, but even in comparison to the Avery Fifteen beer I reviewed, this was very mild.  A great, if mislabeled beer, drinkable but not surprising or deep in any way.