Wine infused sours

[505-Brewer]

Anyone use wine concentrate to either blend into sours (and referment) or ferment out then add to their sours? I'd prefer to just use grapes but I didn't want to commit to 55lbs of grapes and local supplier didn't have the varieties I wanted. Have concentrate for 3 gals of Muscat and 3 gals of Viognier. I have a lot of pale sours and some lambic style sours ad well as saisons fermenting to pick from.

Also thinking it might be nice to bottle condition sours and saisons directly adding a subtle wine flavor. Instead of using simplicity candy syrup or sugar.

Thoughts?

 

[secondbase]

This is something I've been wanting to try but haven't gotten around to. Anxious to hear some replies on the topic.

 

[worlddivides]

I've never heard of using wine itself (or at least, not a lot of wine because I do know of a couple sours that contain a small amount of wine), but there are a ton of sour beers that use wine grapes or raisins. American Sour Beers even mentions a lot of commercial sour beers that use tons of pounds of wine grapes in their beers.

The closest I've gotten to this is a pretty standard Lambic grist fermented with English yeast and then Belgian lambic microbes that has one pound of golden raisins, 2-3 ounces of French oak cubes that were soaked in red wine for a little under a month, and a small amount of that red wine itself. It does have a noticeable wine character to it, but it's certainly not overpowering.

Haven't heard of actually using a large amount of red wine or wine grape must, though, but I think it might complement the flavor since wine is a lot more acidic than non-sour beers. Then again, it might be TOO acidic, especially white wine...

 

[oli-aus]

Wine sour hybrids are some of my favourite beers, jester King do some really good ones.
Haven't used wine concentrate before but it definitely sounds worth a go, the Viognier one could be incredible if that peachy flavour comes through.


Let us know how you get on.

 

[505-Brewer]

Will do. Have some sours to fruit and wine and then I'll need to eventually blend them back. Might be a while.....

Anyone have a good calculator for bottle carbonating? Something like where I could put in the brix of a sugar, wine, fruit juice solution. Im guessing they're all based on dry weight so I'll have to work that out for myself.

 

[NTexBrewer]

Check out this thread that I started. https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=500143

To reduce headspace for aging I added 4 bottles of chardonnay. This beer turned out fantastic.

 

[505-Brewer]

Ah yes. I even posted in that thread. Brewing that beer is also on my list.


I think I'll add some concentrate to a batch and let it ferment out. I can figure 2-4 bottles worth of concentrate should do it.

Still want to prime some saisons with some too.....