Ommegang Aphrodite, Jolly Pumpkin, and cultivating a sour starter

I suppose it was Ommegang brewery that first managed to convince me that I needed to hunt down sour brews. Last winter, my favorite local watering hole had Ommegang's "Aphrodite" on tap, and though I managed to get my hands on a few bottles of it, I found a definite distinction in taste between bottled and tap. For anyone who hasn't tasted Aphrodite, it's a delectable balance of the classic sour barnyard flavor, crisp and tart raspberry, and a slight sweetness I assume comes more from the pears it is brewed with then the raspberries. Kegs of Aphrodite received two months of fermentation with brettanomyces yeast (unfortunately I don't know which strain) as opposed to the bottles which received fermentation from Ommegang's regular saccharomyces yeast then innoculated with brettanomyces during the bottle conditioning. I've currently got my last two bottles of Aphrodite cellared in hopes that time will allow the brett to really do it's thing and chomp away at some of the longer chain sugars that would be left alone by the sacc yeast. Apparently Ommegang released it around August last year, meaning the stuff I was getting off tap was nice and old with some extra months of funk to it, so it's my hope that by the time it rolls around again I can taste the aged bottle against a fresh bottle, and also against the tap.


I've recently gotten my hands on some Jolly Pumpkin. After hearing a lot about this brewery on forums and through word of mouth, I was pleasantly surprised to find beers from Jolly Pumpkin at my favorite local bottle shop. Unfortunately, I guess JP beers get marked up quite a bit in New York State, so my consumption has been fairly limited, but so far I've tried two of their flagship beers and found them quite impressive. I'd say La Roja was the better of the two beers I picked up, it is an Amber Ale soured in a traditional Flanders style. One of the cool things about Jolly Pumpkin is their method of producing beer, according to JP's brewmaster Ron Jeffries, all their beers are aged in oak casks which overtime become inoculated with their own unique blend of souring bugs. Since each barrel will produce it's own slightly different version of the same beer, Jeffries and his crew has to taste each barrel and select which ones to use for blending.
Jeffries tries to taste current batches side by side with the test blends to keep the overall taste and profile, but each bottle has a natural variation, because of this, every bottle of beer out of Jolly Pumpkin comes with a sticker with the blend and bottling date. Eventually these blends are supposed to be searchable online so you can see what went into them. My La Roja blend was #7 and I'm curious as to what information will be available on their site when they make them searchable. I suppose barrel numbers and the length of time each beer was in each barrel, as La Roja, for example, is made from beers aged anywhere from two to ten months in barrel. The second beer I had was the Bam Bièr, a farmhouse styled ale which I feel pales in comparison to La Roja. It had a crisp sourness reminding me of a gueuze. The label is a little messed up in the pic, but I had a blend from batch 943 and 944 in my bottle of Bam.

Anyway, onto the point of this post. A few days ago I made a quick starter from water and a bottle of Malta Goya, essentially unfermented beer sold as a soda-like drink, in a 2-1 ratio. It's got an OG of about 1.060 which I thought might be a little high for a yeast starter when you using bottle dregs, hence the water addition. I have yet to cultivate my own house sour strain, so I used the dregs from the two bottles of Jolly Pumpkin and it seems to be fermenting away. Unfortunately for me, the temperature has been up  in the 80s and 90s all week, so the starter smells a little bready which I think indicates that the saccharomyces has taken a strong foothold in the blend. Fortunately, I think there is enough long chain sugar in the malta goya that the brett and other bugs will still have something to munch on. I intend to blend some dregs from a blackberry-cardamom sour I brewed with 100% brett with the product of the starter when I get around to bottling it. Hopefully that will add a nice large dose of brett to make up for the explosion in sacc that the weather is causing. I'll throw the blend in one more starter and that should leave me with an extremely large slurry that I'll split up into directly pitch-able quantities.