Salivator II Sour Doppelbock Recipe

Lager and sour beer are two concepts rarely put together in the same sentence. Most people associate sour beers with ales and most sour beer undergoes primary fermentation through some top fermenting yeast. There are some sour beers that undergo primary fermentation with lager yeast (such as New Belgium's base sour beers Felix and Oscar) but we find far fewer traditional lager styles adapted to sour brewing. These styles represent a huge swath of unexplored sour brewing opportunities. One can credibly acknowledge there is much overlap between lager beer styles and other sources of sour beer but lagers tend to enjoy far less inspiration and implementation in sour brewing. 

Several years ago, before making Colorado a permanent home, I made my way to Fort Collins to drink through several breweries. The now closed Fort Collins Brewery on one of these trips offered up a sour doppelbock. I was pleasantly surprised by the complexity of the beer. It could have easily stood in line with oud bruins or passed off as a dark sour beer of its own nature. I had fond memories of that trip and that beer so this recipe is a ode to both.

Formulating the sour doppelbock recipe

Rather than build a recipe from scratch I borrowed the doppelbock recipe from braukaiser.com. I don't know what caused Kai Troester to fade away from his active participation on his site and various forums but his site remains an invaluable homebrewing resource. His doppelbock recipe takes inspiration from Spaten Optimator, which is not a bad starting point. It's a simple five malt recipe using munich malt as a base blended with pils, aromatic, caramunich II and caramunich III. 

Here I have kept the spirit of his recipe and made only slight changes. The grain bill remains similar although I split the large portion of munich between munich and vienna malt. (Admittedly I did this because I realized halfway through milling grain that I didn't have enough munich malt on hand as I thought.) I swapped hops from German noble to a higher AA hop. I've also switched his decoction mash for a slightly different schedule and adjusted the water profile to account for giving up an acid rest.

I've adapted the doppelbock recipe for souring by swapping out a lager yeast for WY3278 Lambic Blend and aging it for an extended period of time. I suppose not using a lager yeast technically makes this not a lager but I'm most interested in the flavors driven by German malts than what lager yeast drive. I intend to let this beer sit for at least a year but might let it go for a longer slumber. 

With that in mind let's get to the final recipe.

Sour Doppelbock Recipe

Details
Batch Size: 1 gallon
Est. ABV: 9.2%
Est. IBU: 25
Est. OG: 1.081
Est. FG: 1.011
Est. SRM: 15.6
Expected Efficiency: 72%
Grain Bill	Pounds		Ounces		SRM		Pct. Grist
Pils malt	0		8		2		16.00%
munich malt	1		6		10		44.00%
Vienna malt	1		0		4		32.00%
Aromatic malt	0		1		26		2.00%
Caramunich II	0		1		46		2.00%
Caramunich III	0		2		60		4.00%
Water Profile	ppm
Custom Doppelbock profile
PH: 5.5
Calcium	50
Magnesium	2
Sodium	33
Sulfate	9
Chloride	19
Bicarbonate	39
Water Additions					Mash		Sparge
Gypsum
Epsom Salt					0.1g
Canning Salt
Baking Soda					0.6g
Calcium Chloride					0.2g
Chalk					0.5g
Pickling Lime
Lactic Acid					1.3ml
Mash Schedule	Step Temp.				Step Time
Decoction mash
Mash volume: 5.38qt
Sparge volume: 0.25 gal
Infuse 5.38qt at 156F	147				35
Decoct 0.89qt after 10 minutes
Bring decoction to boil
Return doction to mash	156				40
Sparge 1qt	180
Boil Schedule	Volume		Unit		Time		IBU
60 minute boil
Belma [12%] hops	0.14		oz		60		25
Fermentation Schedule	# Days		Temp.
Yeast: WY3278
Pitch at 64F	365		67
Bottle to 3 volumes

Sour Doppelbock Brewday and Fermentation Notes

Brewed 3.30.19.

First runnings: 1.054

Preboil gravity: 1.050

Preboil volume: 1.4gal

Mash efficiency: 62%

Postboil gravity: 1.060

Postboil volume: 1 gal

Brewhouse efficiency: 53%

Fairly typical day except for really bad efficiency which might be a measurement issue over a procedural defect. I am not too concerned with the ABV on my sour beers but something to watch on the next few beers to see if there is a procedural issue to correct. 

Pitched 1/3 of a pouch of WY3278 (Lambic Blend) into the fermentation vessel and set it in my fermentation chamber to age.

The adventure continues...

7.11.20

This beer is about thirteen months old now and after checking in on it I wanted to take this beer a different direction. Sometimes sour beers are great all by themselves but other times they scream for help. This sour doppelbock would be an alright beer all by itself. It has a nice malt backbone despite turning LAB and brett loose on it. It still has an unmistakable doppelbock character to it. There's a little brett and a reasonable amount of sourness. It has an interesting smoky character; not smoky like brett smokiness or that awful tire fire flavor sour beers can get. It's smoky like a dark chocolate can be. Not bad but could get some help to go from good to great.

I decided to blend the sour doppelbock with a half gallon growler of an unknown blend of various leftover fermented beer from my small oud bruin barrel when I did a primary fermentation outside the barrel and then racked into the barrel for aging. It is a mix of one and two year old sour beer. It tastes of an old sour beer. Very dry, firm sourness, present brett barnyard and the underlying chocolate note in that oud bruin recipe. It too is an ok beer but needs help to reach greatness. 

The blend of the two comes to about 65% sour doppelbock and 35% leftover oud bruin. The blend is better than either beer alone. It has a nice contrast of older and younger sour beer together that lifts both parts while blending the smoky and chocolate notes into a nice dark chocolate. This is approaching great but feels like it needs fruit even more than either component alone. It's cherry season so I plucked six pounds of sweet cherries from the store. I opted for sweet cherries because I think they will fit better with the maltiness from the sour doppelbock better than tart cherries. I could be wrong. Six pounds of cherries to 1.5 gallons of beer is an enormous amount of fruit but I think it will balance out into a nice fruited sour. 

As an aside, you used to be able to buy these Rogue Dead Guy growlers in the store. Like they taped over the lid so it didn't come off and you could buy them for like $10. I believe I bought this around 2009 or 2010 shortly after I started brewing. It was the first growler I had ever seen. Fun fact, when I started brewing sour beer mid-2010 I started sour worting and this was the vessel I used to sour part of the wort in a small mash and then on the full brewday I would add this soured wort to the kettle. Like OG kettle souring. Can you still buy these filled growlers in stores anywhere?

To prepare the fruit I froze them in my chest freezer for half a day to break down the fruit. I split them between two one gallon carboys leaving them intact with the pits and stems. 

I intend to leave the beer on the cherries until around Christmas to make sure the beer extracts flavor from the pits as well which have a vanilla-like flavor.