Burning Beard In Praise of Bacchus

Jeff Wiederkehr, Burning Beard

What follows is a homebrew-scale recipe for Burning Beard’s spontaneously fermented lambic-style beer. Including a turbid mash schedule and long boil, it’s similar to traditional methods followed by Belgian lambic brewers. “Honestly, our only real contribution to this style is believing in it,” says Jeff Wiederkehr, Burning Beard’s cofounder and head brewer. “Believing in the magic of the process and being willing to let go.”

ALL-GRAIN

Batch size: 5 gallons (19 liters)

Brewhouse efficiency: 77% OG: 1.052

FG: 1.000

IBUS: 8

ABV: 6.25%

MALT/GRAIN BILL

4.75 lb (2.7 kg) Belgian pilsner 3.25 lb (1.8 kg) Unmalted wheat 1 lb rice hulls

YEAST

HOPS SCHEDULE

DIRECTIONS

Let go and have a homebrew.

Use aged noble hops [approx. 0.4% AA] We are using hops aged four to six years. With the hops you have on hand, use your favorite ibu/hop age calculator to approximate 5 to 8 ibu following this schedule: 1 oz at 60 minutes

2 oz at 30 minutes

5 oz at flame-out

Mill grains and follow a turbid mash schedule (For more information, see “Turbid Mashing,” beerandbrewing .com), aiming for these steps:

Mash in thick (about 75% of your prefered water to mash ratio) at 113°F (45°C) and hold 15 minutes;

Boil the remaining portion of your water (the 25% you left out), stir in to raise the temperature to 130°F (54°C), hold 10 minutes;

Pull off about one to two quarts of the mash to boil (to be honest, more often than not, I need closer to two quarts to hit my temp; stir in to raise to 145°F (63°C) and hold 30 minutes (don’t be alarmed if you are a little over temp);

Pull off approximately 25% of the mash liquid to boil and stir in to raise to 160°F (71°C) and hold 15 minutes (don’t be alarmed if you are a little under temp);

Vorlauf, lauter and sparge at ~ 188°F (87°C) as necessary to get about 7.6

gallons (29 liters) of wort—or more, depending on your evaporation rate.

Yes, the sparge is hot, we are actually trying to extract tannins.

Boil for 4 hours, adding aged hops according to the above schedule.

After the boil, transfer to a makeshift coolship, if you don’t have a coolship, a 5-gallon mash tun has a pretty good surface area to volume ratio, use it. Set it on a patio, on your roof, in a forest, or in your kitchen to cool overnight (see “Spontaneity: Prospecting for Bugs,” beerandbrewing.com).

Note: If you happen to be in the ladies garment section of your local market, grab some pantyhose. I pull that over the mash tun to keep the bugs out while it cools. Disregard my previous statement about contributions: I have belief and pantyhose!

Transfer to a small oak barrel or, optionally, a fermentor with oak cubes, and age for 12 months or more.

If your barrel is new, I recommend rinsing it several times to reduce some of the oak character. The new barrel can overwhelm a delicate beer.

BREWER’S NOTES

We don’t pitch any yeast, we just turn on the positive pressure fan to pull in the night air, and then we close the door to the shed. As a spontaneously fermented beer, the idea is not to pitch any extraneous yeast or bacteria. However, if you want something somewhat more predictable, some yeast labs sell blends of lambic bugs, such as Wyeast 3278; alternatively, 3763 is fun, or you could even pitch a growler full of fancy dregs. Another fun way to inoculate is to soak your oak cubes in a sort of “wild starter.” You don’t pitch the yeast per se, but you do pitch semi-predictable cubes.

Either way, if you are not sure that you want to go 100 percent spontaneous and leave all of your hard work up to the brewing gods, and you plan to pitch yeast of some sort, I recommend that before you do, pull off some of the spontaneous stuff and bottle it, just to test it out. And, who knows, if you like what you get, you might want to go all spontaneous next time.

They appear to share a common appreciation of experimentation, honesty … and, yeah, a lot of tattoos. Based on the legendary jukebox there, it probably doesn’t hurt to be a metalhead, either.

Vibe & Future

Reputation plus far-flung location leads to a wide-ranging mix of Beard patrons. Mechanics and welders from around the corner join hardcore beer fans who’ve made the trek from downtown San Diego.

The tasting board—split into esoteric categories such as “Postmodern” (mostly IPAS), “Medieval” (classic European styles), “Gothic” (Belgian-style ales and high-abv stouts), and “Transcendental” (tart, sour, and wild ales)—intentionally omits descriptions. That leads to conversations between “beardtender” and drinker.

“I hate splashes,” Lynnette says, with force. “It doesn’t tell anyone anything about the beer to give them a warm, watered-down taste of beer. People want beer education—it’s awesome.”

Rather than building an empire of multiple satellite tasting rooms, Burning Beard has focused its attention on home base, nurturing the existing space to make it the best and most distinctive it can be. “One of the reasons we haven’t opened a second tasting room is we have something unique out there” in El Cajon, Lynnette says. “We’d rather just keep investing in that community, which is why we built a coolship. We would rather make sure there’s a proprietary yeast strain that East County gets to herald as its own, rather than spreading ourselves too thin.”

Based on the solid following and accolades the Beard has collected in its four-year tenure, the strategy appears to be working.